<77fe  CAREER  of 
LEONARD  WOOD 


JOSEPH  HAMBLEN  SEARS 


\ 


THE  CAREER  OF 
LEONARD  WOOD 


LEONARD    WOOD 


THE  CAREER  OF 
LEONARD  WOOD 


BY 

JOSEPH  HAMBLEN  SEARS 


D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  LONDOISf 

1919 


COPYRIGHT,  1919,  BY 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


PBINTED   IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


TO  GENERAL  LEONARD  WOOD 
BY  CORINNE  ROOSEVELT  ROBINSON 

Your  vision  keen,  unerring  when  the  blind, 

Who  could  not  see,  turned,  groping,  from  the  light, 
Your  sentient  knowledge  of  the  wise  and  right 

Have  won  to-day  the  freedom  of  mankind. 

Honor  to  whom  the  honor  be  assigned ! 

Mightier  in  exile  than  the  men  whose  might 
Is  of  the  sword  alone,  and  not  of  sight, 

You  march  beside  the  victor  host  aligned. 

Had  not  your  spirit  soared,  our  ardent  youth 
Had  faltered  leaderless;  their  eager  feet 

Attuned  to  effort  for  the  valiant  truth 

Through  your  command  rushed  swiftly  to  compete 

To  hold  on  high  the  torch  of  Liberty — 

Great-visioned  Soul,  yours  is  the  victory! 

November  11,  1918 

From,  "Service  and  Sacrifice:  Poe-ns" 


Copyright,  1915,  1916,  1917,  1918.  1919.  by 

Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
By  permission  of  the  publishers. 


CONTENTS 

I.  THE  SUBJECT u 

II.  THE  INDIAN  FIGHTER 25 

III.  THE  OFFICIAL 51 

IV.  THE  SOLDIER ^7 

V.  THE  ORGANIZER     . 101 

VI.  THE  ADMINISTRATOR 129 

VII.  THE  STATESMAN 159 

VIII.  THE  PATRIOT 201 

IX.  THE  GREAT  WAR 225 

X.  THE  RESULT 257 


THE  SUBJECT 


THE  SUBJECT 

IN  these  clays  immediately  following  the  Great 
War  it  is  well  upon  beginning  anything — even  a 
modest  biographical  sketch — to  consider  a  few 
elementals  and  distinguish  them  from  the  changing 
unessentials,  to  keep  a  sound  basis  of  sense  and  not 
be  led  into  hysteria,  to  look  carefully  again  at 
the  beams  of  our  house  and  not  be  deceived  into 
thinking  that  the  plaster  and  the  wall  paper  are 
the  supports  of  the  building. 

Let  us  consider  a  few  of  these  elementals  that 
apply  to  the  subject  in  hand  as  well  as  to  the  rest 
of  the  universe — elemental  truths  which  clo  not 
change,  which  no  Great  War  can  alter  in  the  least, 
which  serve  as  guides  at  all  times  and  will  help  at 
every  doubtful  point.  They  range  themselves 
somewhat  as  follows: 

The  human  being  is  entitled  to  the  pursuit  of 
happiness — happiness  in  the  very  broadest  sense 
of  the  word.  No  one  can  approach  this  object 
11 


Leonard  Wood 


unless  he  is  in  some  way  subordinated  to  some 
thing  and  unless  he  is  responsible  for  something. 
No  man  can  get  satisfaction  out  of  life  unless  he 
is  responsible  for  what  he  does  to  some  authority 
higher  than  himself  and  unless  there  is  some  one 
or  something  that  looks  to  him  for  guidance. 
Perhaps  the  existence  of  religion  has  much  to  do 
with  this.  Perhaps  prayer  and  all  that  it  means 
to  us  belongs  in  the  category  of  the  first  of  these 
elementals.  Certainly  the  family  is  an  example 
of  the  second. 

The  family  is  the  unit  of  civilization  —  always 
has  been  and  always  will  be.  The  father  and  the 
mother  have  their  collective  existence,  and  their 
children  looking  to  them  for  guidance,  support 
and  growth,  both  physical  and  moral.  The  mo 
ment  the  family  begins  to  exist  it  becomes  a  re 
sponsibility  for  its  head,  and  around  it  centers  a 
large  part  of  the  life  and  happiness  of  the  hu 
man  being. 

In  like  manner  the  state  is  the  unit  to  which 
we  are  subordinated. 

These  constitute  two  examples  of  responsibil 
ity  and  subordination  which  are  necessary  to  the 


The  Subject 


acquirement  of  civilization,  of  happiness  and  of 
the  rewards  of  life. 

Wherever  the  state  has  presumed  to  enter  too 
far  into  the  conduct  of  the  family  it  has  over 
stepped  its  bounds  and  that  particular  civiliza 
tion  has  degenerated.  Wherever  the  family  has 
presumed  to  give  up  its  subordination  to  the  state 
and  gather  unto  itself  the  responsibility  through 
special  privilege,  that  particular  state  has  begun 
to  die. 

In  modern  civilization  it  is  as  impossible  to 
conceive  of  a  state  without  the  unit  of  the  fam 
ily,  as  it  is  to  consider  groups  of  families  without 
something  that  we  call  a  state.  It  is  ludicrous  to 
think  of  a  strong  and  virile  nation  composed  of 
one  hundred  million  bachelors.  We  must  go  back 
to  the  feudal  days  of  the  middle  ages  to  get  a  pic 
ture  of  the  family  without  a  state. 

In  other  words,  a  man,  to  approach  happiness, 
must  have  his  family  in  support  of  which  it  is  his 
privilege  to  take  off  his  coat  and  work,  and — if 
fate  so  decree — live;  and  he  must  have  his  coun 
try's  flag  in  honor  of  which  it  is  his  privilege  to 
take  off  his  hat,  and — if  need  be — die. 
18 


•'•,  •    ,-f  ffi£/(?urefrr  of  ^Leonard  Wood 


Love  and  patriotism — these  are  the  names  of 
two  of  the  sturdy  beams  of  the  house  of  civiliza 
tion. 

These  old  familiar  laws  have  been  brought  for 
ward  again  by  the  outbreak  of  the  Great  War. 
There  is  a  letter  in  existence  written  by  a  young 
soldier  who  volunteered  at  the  start,  a  letter  which 
he  wrote  to  his  unborn  son  as  he  sat  in  a  front 
line  trench  in  France.  It  tells  the  whole  great 
truth  in  a  line.  It  says :  "My  little  son,  I  do  not 
fully  realize  just  why  I  am  fighting  here,  but  I 
know  that  one  reason  is  to  make  sure  that  you  will 
not  have  to  do  it  by  and  by."  That  lad  was  re 
sponsible  for  a  new  family,  and  was  the  servant 
of  his  state — and  he  began  his  approach  to  the 
great  happiness  when  he  thought  of  writing  that 
letter. 

It  will  be  well  for  us  to  remember  these  simple 
laws  as  we  proceed. 

Fifty-eight  years  ago  these  laws  and  several 
more  like  them  were  just  as  true  as  they  are  now. 
Fifty-eight  years  hence  they  will  still  be  true,  as 
they  will  be  five  thousand  eight  hundred  years 
hence.  Fifty-eight  years  ago — to  be  exact,  Octo- 


The  Subject 


her  9,  1860 — there  was  born  up  in  New  Hamp 
shire  a  man  child  named  Leonard  Wood,  in  the 
town  of  Winchester,  whence  he  was  transferred 
at  the  age  of  three  months  to  Massachusetts  and 
finally  at  the  age  of  eight  years  to  Pocasset  on 
Cape  Cod.  This  man  child  is  still  alive  at  the 
time  of  writing,  and  during  his  fifty-eight  years 
he  has  stood  for  these  elemental  truths  in  and  out 
of  boyhood,  youth  and  manhood  in  such  a  fash 
ion  that  his  story — always  interesting — becomes 
valuable  at  a  time  when,  the  Great  War  being 
over,  many  nations,  to  say  nothing  of  many  in 
dividuals,  are  forgetting,  in  their  admiration  of 
the  new  plaster  and  the  wall  paper,  that  the  beams 
of  the  house  of  civilization  are  what  hold  it  strong 
and  sturdy  as  the  ages  proceed. 

This  place,  Cape  Cod,  where  the  formative  years 
of  Leonard  Wood's  life  were  passed,  is  a  sand  bank 
left  by  some  melting  glacier  sticking  out  into  the 
Atlantic  in  the  shape  of  a  doubled-up  arm  with  a 
clenched  fist  as  if  it  were  ready  at  any  moment 
to  strike  out  and  defend  New  England  against 
any  attack  that  might  come  from  the  eastward. 
Those  who  call  it  their  native  place  have  acquired 
15 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

something  of  its  spirit.  They  have  ever  been 
ready  to  oppose  any  aggression  from  the  east 
ward  or  any  other  direction,  and  they  have  ever 
been  ready  to  stand  firmly  upon  the  conviction 
that  the  integrity  of  the  family  and  of  the  state 
must  be  maintained.  And  young  Wood  from 
them  and  from  his  Mayflower  Pilgrim  ancestors 
absorbed  and  was  born  with  a  common  sense  and 
a  directness  of  vision  that  have  appeared  through 
out  his  life  under  whatever  conditions  he  found 
himself. 

There  seems  to  have  been  nothing  remark 
able  about  him  either  in  his  boyhood  or  in  his 
youth.  He  achieved  nothing  out  of  the  ordinary 
through  that  whole  period.  But  there  has  always 
been  in  him  somewhere,  the  solid  basis  of  sense  and 
reason  which  kept  him  to  whatever  purpose  he 
set  himself  to  achieve  along  the  lines  of  the  great 
elemental  truths  of  life  and  far  away  from  vision 
ary  hallucinations  of  any  sort.  If  it  was  Indian 
fighting,  he  worked  away  at  the  basis  of  the  ques 
tion  and  got  ready  and  then  carried  out.  If  it 
was  war,  the  same.  If  it  was  administration,  he 
16 


The  Subject 


studied  the  essentials,  prepared  for  them,  aiul  then 
carried  them  out. 

Like  all  great  achievements,  it  is  simplicity  it 
self  and  can  be  told  in  words  of  one  syllable.  In 
all  lines  of  his  extraordinarily  varied  career  ex 
tending  over  all  the  corners  of  the  globe  he  re 
spected  and  built  up  authority  of  government  and 
protected  and  encouraged  the  development  of  the 
family  unit.  One  might  say  "Why  not?  Of 
course."  The  answer  is  "Who  in  this  country  in 
the  last  thirty  years  has  done  it  to  anything  like 
the  same  extent?" 

Many  minds  during  this  time  have  advanced 
new  ideas ;  many  men  have  invented  amazing 
things ;  many  able  people  have  opened  up  new  ave 
nues  of  thought  and  vision  to  the  imagination  of 
the  world,  sometimes  to  good  and  lasting  purpose, 
sometimes  otherwise.  But  who  has  taken  what 
ever  problem  was  presented  to  him  and  invariably, 
no  matter  what  quality  was  required,  brought  that 
problem  to  a  successful  conclusion  without  up 
heaval,  or  chaos,  or  even  much  excitement  for 
any  one  outside  the  immediately  interested  group  ? 

It  is  not  genius;  it  is  organization.  It  is  not 
17 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  flare  of  inventive  ability;  it  is  the  high  vision 
of  one  whose  code  rested  always  on  elemental, 
sound  and  enduring  principles  and  who  has  not 
swerved  from  these  to  admire  the  plaster  and  the 
paper  on  the  wall.  It  is  finally  the  great  quality 
that  makes  a  man  keep  his  feet  on  the  ground  and 
his  heart  amongst  the  bright  stars. 

Of  such  stuff  are  the  men  of  this  world  made 
whom  people  lean  on,  whom  people  naturally  look 
to  in  emergency,  who  guide  instinctively  and  un 
erringly,  carrying  always  the  faith  of  those  about 
them  because  they  deal  with  sound  things,  ele 
mental  truths  and  sane  methods — because  they 
give  mankind  what  Leonard  Wood's  greatest 
friend  called  "a  square  deal." 

It  is  difficult  to  treat  much  of  his  youth  be 
cause  he  is  still  living  and  the  family  life  of  any 
man  is  his  own  and  not  the  public's  business.  But 
there  is  a  certain  interest  attaching  to  his  life- 
work  for  his  country  in  knowing  that  his  great- 
great-grandfather  commanded  a  regiment  in  the 
Revolutionary  army  at  Bunker  Hill  and  that  his 
father  was  a  doctor  who  served  in  the  Union  army 
during  the  Civil  War.  Out  of  such  heredity  has 
18 


The  Subject 


come  a  doctor  who  is   a  Major  General  in  the 
United  States  Army. 

At  the  same  time  his  own  life  on  Cape  Cod  out 
side  of  school  at  the  Middleboro  Academy  was 
marked  by  what  might  distinguish  any  youngster 
of  that  day  and  place — a  strong  liking  for  small 
boating,  for  games  out  of  doors,  for  riding,  shoot 
ing  and  fishing.  These  came  from  a  fine  healthy 
body  which  to  this  day  at  his  present  age  is  amaz 
ing  in  its  capacity  to  carry  him  through  physi 
cal  work.  He  can  to-day  ride  a  hundred  miles 
at  a  stretch  and  walk  thirty  miles  in  any  twenty- 
four  hours. 

Later  in  life  this  was  one  of  the  many  points 
of  common  interest  that  drew  him  and  Theodore 
Roosevelt  so  closely  together.  It  has  no  particu 
lar  significance  other  than  to  make  it  possible  for 
him  in  many  lands  at  many  different  times  to  do 
that  one  great  thing  which  makes  men  leaders — 
to  show  his  men  the  way,  to  do  himself  whatever 
he  asked  others  to  do,  never  to  give  an  order 
whether  to  a  military,  sanitary,  medical  or  ad 
ministrative  force  that  he  could  not  and  did  not 
do  himself  in  so  far  as  one  man  could  do  it. 
19 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

There  was  little  or  no  money  in  the  Wood  fam 
ily  and  the  young  man  had  to  plan  early  to  look 
out  for  himself.  He  wanted  to  go  to  sea — prob 
ably  because  he  lived  on  Cape  Cod  and  came  from 
a  long  line  of  New  Englanders.  He  wanted  to 
go  into  the  Navy.  He  even  planned  to  join  an 
Arctic  expedition  at  the  age  of  twenty  and  be 
gan  to  collect  material  for  his  outfit.  But  finally, 
following  his  father's  lead,  he  settled  upon  the 
study  of  medicine. 

This  led  to  the  Harvard  University  Medical 
School  and  to  his  graduation  in  1884.  There 
then  followed  the  regular  internship  of  a  young 
physician  and  the  beginning  of  practice  in  Bos 
ton. 

Then  came  the  change  that  separated  Wood 
from  the  usual  lot  of  well  educated,  well  prepared 
doctors  who  come  out  of  a  fine  medical  school  and 
begin  their  lifework  of  following  their  profession 
and  building  up  a  practice,  a  record,  a  family  and 
the  history  which  is  the  highest  ideal  man  can 
have  and  the  collective  result  of  which  is  a  sound 
nation. 

Wood  wanted  action.  He  wanted  to  do  some- 
20 


The  Subject 


thing.  He  had  a  strong  inclination  to  the  out-of- 
doors.  And  it  is  probably  this,  together  with  his 
inheritance  and  the  chances  of  the  moment,  that 
led  him  to  enter  the  army  as  a  surgeon.  As  there 
was  no  immediate  vacancy  in  the  medical  corps  he 
took  the  job  of  contract  surgeon  at  a  salary  of 
$100  a  month  and  was  first  ordered  to  duty  at 
Fort  Warren  in  Boston  Harbor  where  he  stayed 
only  a  few  days.  His  request  for  "action"  was 
granted  in  June,  1885,  and  he  was  ordered  to  Ari 
zona  to  report  to  General  Crook  on  the  Mexican 
border  near  Fort  Huachuca. 

And  here  begins  the  career  of  Leonard  Wood. 


THE  INDIAN  FIGHTER 


II 

THE  INDIAN  FIGHTER 

THE  problem  was  what  turned  out  to  be  the  last 
of  the  Indian  fighting,  involving  a  long-drawn-out 
campaign.  For  over  a  hundred  years,  as  every 
one  knows,  the  unequal  struggle  of  two  races  for 
this  continent  had  been  in  progress  and  the  his 
tory  of  it  is  the  ever  tragic  story  of  the  survival 
of  the  fittest.  No  one  can  read  it  without  regret 
at  the  destruction,  the  extermination,  of  a  race. 
No  one,  however,  can  for  a  moment  hesitate  in  his 
judgment  of  the  inevitableness  of  it,  since  it  is 
and  always  will  be  the  truth  that  the  man  or  the 
race  or  the  nation  which  cannot  keep  up  with  the 
times  must  go  under — and  should  go  under.  Edu 
cation,  brains,  genius,  organization,  ability,  imagi 
nation,  vision — whatever  it  may  be  called  or  by 
how  many  names — will  forever  destroy  and  push 
out  ignorance,  incompetence,  stupidity. 

The  Indians  were  not  able — tragic  as  the  truth 
25 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

is — to  move  onward,  and  so  they  had  to  move  out 
and  give  place  to  the  more  worthy  tenant. 

The  end  of  this  century  of  struggle  was  the 
campaign  against  the  Apaches  in  the  Southwest 
along  the  Mexican  border,  where  they  made  their 
last  stand  under  their  able  leader  Geronimo. 

The  young  doctor  was  detailed  at  once  for  duty 
on  a  broiling  fourth  of  July  under  Captain- 
afterwards  General — Henry  W.  Lawton,  and  the 
next  day  he  rode  a  horse  over  thirty-five  miles. 
That  incident  to  the  initiated  is  noteworthy,  but 
even  more  so  is  the  fact  that  shortly  afterwards 
in  a  hard  drive  of  five  succeeding  days  he  averaged 
eighteen  hours  a  day  either  in  the  saddle  or  on 
foot,  leading  the  horses.  It  was  a  stiff  test.  To 
make  it  worse  he  was  given  the  one  unassigned 
horse — that  is  to  say,  a  horse  that  was  known  as 
an  "outlaw" — whose  jerky  gait  made  each  saddle- 
sore  complain  at  every  step.  The  sun  beat  down 
fiercely ;  but,  burned  and  blistered  fore  and  aft, 
Leonard  Wood  could  still  smile  and  ask  for  more 
action. 

The  stoicism  of  the  tenderfoot  who  had  come 
to  play  their  game  was  not  lost  on  the  troopers 
26 


The  Indian  Fighter 


with  whom  he  was  to  spend  the  next  two  years 
fighting  Indians.  He  "healed  in  the  saddle"  at 
once  and  a  few  weeks  later  was  out-riding  and 
out-marching  the  best  of  Captain  Lawton's  com 
mand,  all  of  whom  were  old  and  experienced  Indian 
fighters. 

This  was  not  to  be  the  last  time  that  Leonard 
Wood  was  to  find  himself  faced  at  the  outset  by 
tacit  suspicion  and  lack  of  confidence  on  the  part 
of  the  men  he  was  to  command.  Years  later  in 
the  Philippines  he  was  put  up  against  a  similar 
hostility,  with  responsibilities  a  thousandfold  more 
grave,  and  in  the  same  dogged  way  he  won  con 
fidence — unquestioning  loyalty — by  proving  that 
he  was  better  than  the  best.  "Do  it  and  don't 
talk  about  it,"  was  his  formula  for  success.  It 
was  this  quality  in  him  that  made  it  possible  for 
Captain  Lawton  to  write  to  General  Nelson  A. 
Miles,  who  had  then  succeeded  General  Crook, 
after  the  successful  Geronimo  campaign :  "... 
I  can  only  repeat  that  I  have  before  reported 
officially  and  what  I  have  said  to  you:  that  his 
services  during  the  trying  campaign  were  of  the 
highest  order.  I  speak  particularly  of  services 
27 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

other  than  those  devolving  upon  him  as  a  medical 
officer;  services  as  a  combatant  or  line  officer  vol 
untarily  performed.  He  sought  the  most  difficult 
work,  and  by  his  determination  and  courage  ren 
dered  a  successful  issue  of  the  campaign  possible." 

General  Crook,  who  commanded  the  troops 
along  the  border,  characterized  the  Apaches  as 
"tigers  of  the  human  race."  Tigers  they  were, 
led  by  Geronimo,  the  man  whose  name  became  a 
by-word  for  savagery  and  cruelty.  For  a  time 
these  Indians  had  remained  subdued  and  quiet  upon 
a  reservation,  and  there  can  be  no  question  but 
what  the  subsequent  outbreaks  that  led  to  the  long 
campaign  in  which  Wood  took  part  were  due 
largely  to  the  lack  of  judgment  displayed  by  the 
officials  in  whose  charge  they  were  placed.  Both 
the  American  settlers  and  the  Mexicans  opposed 
the  location  of  the  Indians  on  the  San  Carlos 
reservation  and  lost  no  opportunity  to  show  their 
hostility.  When  General  Crook  took  command  of 
that  district  he  found  he  had  to  deal  with  a  mean, 
sullen  and  treacherous  band  of  savages. 

The  American  forces  were  constantly  embroiled 
with  the  Chiricahuas.  Treaties  and  agreements 
28 


The  Indian  Fighter 


were  made  only  to  be  broken  whenever  blood  lust 
or  "tiswin" — a  strong  drink  made  from  corn — 
moved  the  tribe  to  the  warpath  and  fresh  depre 
dations.  Due  to  General  Crook's  tireless  efforts 
there  were  several  occasions  when  the  Indians  re 
mained  quietly  on  their  reservation,  but  it  was 
only  a  matter  of  months  at  the  best  before  one  of 
the  tribes,  usually  the  Chiricahuas,  would  break 
forth  again.  Not  until  the  treaty  of  1882  with 
Mexico  was  it  possible  for  our  troops  to  pursue 
them  into  the  Mexican  mountains  where  they  took 
refuge  after  each  uprising.  In  1883  General 
Crook  made  an  expedition  into  Mexico  which  re 
sulted  in  the  return  of  the  Chiricahuas  and  the 
Warm  Springs  tribes  under  Geronimo  and  Natchez 
to  the  Apache  reservation. 

Two  years  of  comparative  quiet  followed.  The 
Indians  followed  agricultural  pursuits  and  the 
settlers,  who  had  come  to  establish  themselves  on 
ranches  along  the  border,  went  out  to  their  plow 
ing  and  fence  building  unarmed.  In  May,  1885, 
the  Indians  indulged  in  an  extensive  and  prolonged 
"tiswin"  drunk.  The  savagery  that  lurked  in 
their  hearts  broke  loose  and  they  escaped  from 
29 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

their  reservation  in  small  bands,  leaving  smoking 
trails  of  murder,  arson  and  pillage  behind  them. 
Acts  of  ugly  violence  followed.  General  Crook 
threatened  to  kill  the  last  one  of  them,  if  it  took 
fifty  years,  and  at  one  moment  it  seemed  as  though 
he  had  them  under  control.  "Tiswin"  once  again 
set  them  loose  and  they  stampeded. 

Their  daring  and  illusiveness  kept  the  Ameri 
can  and  Mexican  troops  constantly  in  action. 
One  band  of  eleven  Indians  crossed  into  the 
United  States,  raided  an  Apache  reservation, 
killed  Indians  as  well  as  thirty-eight  whites,  cap 
tured  two  hundred  head  of  stock  and  returned  to 
Mexico  after  having  traveled  four  weeks  and  cov 
ered  over  1,200  miles. 

It  was  into  such  warfare  that  Wood  was 
plunged.  No  sooner  had  he  arrived  and  begun 
his  work  than  he  put  in  a  request  for  line  duty 
in  addition  to  his  duties  as  a  medical  officer.  This 
was  granted  immediately,  because  the  need  of 
men  who  could  do  something  was  too  great  to 
admit  of  much  punctiliousness  in  the  matter  of 
military  custom.  Before  the  arrival  of  his  com 
mission  as  Assistant  Surgeon,  January,  1886,  he 
30 


The  Indian  Fighter 


had  served  as  commanding  officer  of  infantry  in 
a  desperately  hard  pursuit  in  the  Sierra  Madrcs, 
ending  in  an  attack  on  an  Indian  camp.  He  was 
repeatedly  assigned  to  the  most  strenuous,  fa 
tiguing  duty.  After  having  marched  on  foot  one 
day  twenty-five  miles  with  Indian  scouts  he  rode 
seventy-three  miles  with  a  message  at  night,  com 
ing  back  at  dawn  the  next  day,  just  in  time 
to  break  camp  and  march  thirty-four  miles  to  a 
new  camp.  He  was  given  at  his  own  request  com 
mand  of  infantry  under  Captain  Lawton,  and 
this  assignment  to  line  duty  was  sanctioned  by 
General  Miles,  who  had  recently  taken  over  the 
command  of  the  troops  along  the  border. 

General  Miles  was  one  of  the  greatest  Indian 
fighters  the  country  has  ever  known.  He  was 
peculiarly  fitted  to  assume  this  new  job  of  sup 
pressing  the  Apache.  He  judged  and  selected 
the  men  who  were  to  be  a  part  of  this  campaign 
by  his  own  well-established  standards.  As  its 
leader  he  selected  Captain  Lawton,  then  serving 
with  the  Fourth  United  States  Cavalry  at  Fort 
Huachuca,  primarily  because  Captain  Lawton 
believed  that  these  Indians  could  be  subjugated. 
31 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

He  had  met  their  skill  and  cunning  and  physical 
strength  through  years  of  such  warfare  under 
General  Crook,  and  possessed  the  necessary  quali 
fications  to  meet  the  demands  of  the  trying  cam 
paign  that  faced  him.  After  speaking  of  Captain 
Lawton,  General  Miles  says  in  his  published  recol 
lections  : 

"I  also  found  at  Fort  Huachuca  another  splen 
did  type  of  American  manhood,  Captain  Leonard 
Wood,  Assistant  Surgeon,  United  States  Army. 
He  was  a  young  officer,  age  twenty-four,  a  native 
of  Massachusetts,  a  graduate  of  Harvard,  a  fair- 
haired,  blue-eyed  young  man  of  great  intelligence, 
sterling,  manly  qualities  and  resolute  spirit.  He 
was  also  perhaps  as  fine  a  specimen  of  physical 
strength  and  endurance  as  could  easily  be  found." 

".  .  .  His  services  and  observations  and  exam 
ple  were  most  commendable  and  valuable,  and 
added  much  to  the  physical  success  of  the  enter 
prise." 

General  Field  Orders  No.  7,  issued  April  20, 
1886,  by  General  Miles  for  the  guidance  of  the 
troops  in  his  command,  tell  clearly  and  concisely 
the  character  and  demands  of  the  time. 
32 


The  Indian  Fighter 


"The  chief  object  of  the  troops  will  be  to  cap 
ture  or  destroy  any  band  of  hostile  Apache  In 
dians  found  in  this  section  of  the  country,  and  to 
this  end  the  most  vigorous  and  persistent  efforts 
will  be  required  of  all  officers  and  soldiers  until 
this  object  is  accomplished. 

".  .  .  The  cavalry  will  be  used  in  light  scouting 
parties  with  a  sufficient  force  held  in  readiness  at 
all  times  to  make  the  most  persistent  and  effective 
pursuit. 

"To  avoid  any  advantage  the  Indians  may  have 
by  a  relay  of  horses,  where  a  troop  or  squadron 
commander  is  near  the  hostile  Indians,  he  will  be 
justified  in  dismounting  one  half  of  his  command 
and  selecting  the  lightest  and  best  riders  to  make 
pursuit  by  the  most  vigorous  forced  marches  until 
the  strength  of  all  the  animals  of  his  command 
shall  have  been  exhausted. 

"In  this  way  a  command  should,  under  a  judi 
cious  leader,  capture  a  band  of  Indians  or  drive 
them  from  150  to  200  miles  in  forty-eight  hours 
through  a  country  favorable  for  cavalry  move 
ments  ;  and  the  horses  of  the  troops  will  be  trained 
for  this  purpose." 

33 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

To  get  a  picture  of  young  Wood  at  this  time 
it  is  necessary  to  look  at  the  situation  through 
the  eyes  of  that  day  and  through  the  eyes  of 
youth  as  well. 

A  young  man  of  twenty-four  had  been  brought 
up  by  the  sea  in  what  we  will  call  for  the  sake  of 
politeness  conservative  New  England.  He  had  all 
the  sound  and  sane  basis  of  character  that  comes 
from  what  in  this  country  was  an  old  and  estab 
lished  civilization.  He  had  been  educated  in  his 
profession  at  the  most  academic  and  conservative 
institution  in  the  United  States;  a  profession 
which  while  not  an  exact  science  is  nevertheless  a 
science  requiring  sane  methods  and  the  elimination 
of  risks.  He  had  begun  the  regular  work  of  this 
profession.  He  possessed  also  what  every  young 
man  with  a  healthy  body  of  that  day  possessed — 
and  still  possesses — a  passion  for  romance,  for 
the  road,  for  the  great  adventure  which  at  that 
time  in  this  country  still  centered  around  the 
pistol  shooting,  broncho  riding,  Indian  fighting 
cowboy. 

We  who  are  old  have  forgotten*  the  paper 
covered  stories  we  used  to  read  surreptitiously 
34 


The  Indian  Fighter 


about  the  "Broncho  Buster's  Revenge,"  or  "The 
Three-Fingered  Might  of  the  West."  But  we 
did  read  them  and  long  for  the  great  life  of  the 
plains.  Even  Jesse  James  was  a  hero  to  many 
of  us. 

But  for  a  New  Englander  educated  at  Harvard 
to  the  practice  of  medicine  to  pick  up  his  deeply 
driven  stakes  and  actually  go  into  this  realm  of 
romance  was  unusual  in  the  extreme ;  and  to  be  so 
well  trained  and  in  such  good  condition,  with  such 
high  courage  as  to  make  good  at  once  amongst 
those  men  who  looked  down  on  an  Eastern  tender 
foot  was  sufficiently  rare  to  promise  much  for  the 
future. 

The  young  man  had  the  love  of  romance  that 
all  young  lives  have,  but  he  had  the  unusual  stim 
ulus  to  it  that  led  him  to  make  it  for  the  moment 
his  actual  life.  And  those  who  study  his  whole 
life  will  find  again  and  again  that  when  the  part 
ing  of  the  ways  came  he  invariably  took  the  road 
of  adventure,  provided  that  it  was  always  in  the 
service  of  his  country.  Such  then  was  the  make 
up  and  the  condition  of  this  young  man  when  in 
the  spring  of  1886  Captain  Lawton,  having  re- 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

ceived  orders  to  assume  command  of  the  expedi 
tion  into  Mexico  against  the  hostile  Apache, 
included  Wood  as  one  of  his  four  officers.  The 
force  consisted  of  forty-five  troopers,  twenty  In 
dian  scouts,  thirty  infantrymen  and  two  pack 
trains.  And  thus  began  the  two-thousand-mile 
chase  into  the  fastnesses  of  Sonora  and  Chihuahua 
which  ended  with  the  surrender  of  Geronimo. 

General  Miles'  campaign  methods  differed  from 
those  of  General  Crook  in  many  ways.  He  always 
assumed  the  aggressive.  His  motto  was,  "Follow 
the  Indian  wherever  he  goes  and  strike  him  when 
ever  you  can.  No  matter  how  bad  the  country, 
go  on."  Under  these  instructions  the  troops  went 
over  the  border  and  down  into  the  depths  of  the 
Sonora,  jumping  the  Indian  whenever  an  oppor 
tunity  offered,  never  giving  him  any  rest.  Wher 
ever  he  went  the  troops  followed.  If  he  struck 
the  border,  a  well  arranged  system  of  heliostat 
stations  passed  the  word  along  to  a  body  of  wait 
ing  or  passing  scouts.  General  Miles'  methods 
differed  from  those  of  General  Crook  also  in  the 
matter  of  the  use  of  the  heliostat,  a  system  of 
signaling  based  on  flashes  of  the  sun's  rays  from 
36 


The  Indian  Fighter 


mirrors.  He  had  used  them  experimentally  while 
stationed  in  the  Department  of  the  Columbia,  and 
now  determined  to  make  them  of  practical  use  at 
his  new  station.  Over  the  vast  tracts  of  rough, 
unpopulated  land  of  Arizona  and  Mexico  the  sig 
nals  flashed,  keeping  different  detachments  in 
touch  with  their  immediate  commands,  and  the 
campaign  headquarters  in  touch  with  its  base. 

Even  before  Captain  Lawton's  command  could 
be  made  ready  the  Indians  themselves  precipitated 
the  fight.  Instead  of  remaining  in  the  Sierra 
Madres,  wlure  they  were  reasonably  safe  from 
assault,  they  commenced  a  campaign  of  violence 
south  of  the  boundary.  This  gave  both  the 
American  troops  and  the  Mexicans  who  were  op 
erating  in  conjunction  with  them  exact  knowledge 
of  their  whereabouts.  On  the  27th  of  April  they 
came  northward,  invading  the  United  States.  In 
numerable  outrages  were  committed  by  them 
which  are  now  part  of  the  history  of  that  heart 
breaking  campaign.  One,  for  example,  typical 
of  the  rest  was  the  case  of  the  Peck  family.  Their 
ranch  was  surrounded,  the  family  captured  and  a 
number  of  the  ranch  hands  killed.  The  husband 
37 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

was  tied  and  compelled  to  witness  the  tortures  to 
which  his  wife  was  submitted.  His  daughter,  thir 
teen  years  old,  was  abducted  by  the  band  and 
carried  nearly  three  hundred  miles.  In  the  mean 
time  Captain  Lawton's  command  with  Wood  in 
charge  of  the  Apache  scouts  was  pursuing  them 
hotly.  A  short  engagement  between  the  Mexican 
troops  and  the  Indians  followed.  On  the  heels 
of  this  the  American  troops  came  up  and  the  little 
Peck  girl  was  recaptured.  Nightfall,  however, 
prevented  any  decisive  engagement,  and  before 
daybreak  the  Indians  had  slipped  t.,vay. 

The  Indians  found  it  better  to  divide  into  two 
bands,  one  under  Natchez,  which  turned  to  the 
north,  and  the  other  under  Geronimo,  which  went 
to  the  west.  The  first  band  was  intercepted  by 
Lieutenant  Brett  of  the  Second  Cavalry  after  a 
heartbreaking  pursuit.  At  one  time  the  pursuing 
party  was  on  the  trail  for  twenty-six  hours  with 
out  a  halt,  and  eighteeen  hours  without  water. 
The  men  suffered  so  intensely  from  thirst  that 
many  of  them  opened  their  veins  to  moisten  their 
lips  with  their  own  blood.  But  the  Indians  suf 
fered  far  more.  In  Geronimo's  story  of  those 
38 


The  Indian  Fighter 


days,  published  many  years  later,  he  wrote :  "We 
killed  cattle  to  eat  whenever  we  were  in  need  of 
food,  but  we  frequently  suffered  greatly  for  need 
of  water.  At  one  time  we  had  no  water  for  two 
days  and  nights,  and  our  horses  almost  died  of 
thirst."  Finally  on  the  evening  of  June  6th  the 
cavalry  came  into  contact  with  Geronimo's  band 
and  the  Indians  were  scattered. 

For  four  months  Captain  Lawton  and  Leonard 
Wood  pursued  the  savages  over  mountain  ranges 
and  through  the  canyons.  During  this  time  the 
troops  marched  1,396  miles.  The  conditions  under 
which  they  worked  were  cruel.  The  intense  heat, 
the  lack  of  water,  and  the  desperately  rough  coun 
try  covered  with  mountains  and  cactus  hindered 
the  command,  but  the  men  had  the  consolation  of 
knowing  that  the  Indians  were  in  worse  plight. 
Furthermore,  the  trustworthiness  of  the  Indian 
scouts,  a  tattered,  picturesque  band  of  renegades, 
was  coming  under  suspicion.  Perhaps  it  was  be 
cause  of  their  unreliability  that  an  attack  made 
upon  the  13th  of  July  was  not  an  entire  success. 
The  Indians  escaped,  but  their  most  valued  pos- 
39 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

sessions,  food  and  horses,  fell  into  the  hands  of 
our  troopers. 

It  was  the  beginning  of  the  end.  A  month  later 
they  received  word  that  the  Indians  were  working 
towards  Santa  Teresa,  and  Captain  Lawton  moved 
forward  to  head  them  off.  Leonard  Wood's  per 
sonal  account  of  this  engagement  follows: 

"On  the  13th  of  July  we  effected  the  surprise 
of  the  camp  of  Geronimo  and  Natchez  which 
eventually  led  to  their  surrender  and  resulted  in 
the  immediate  capture  of  everything  in  their 
camps  except  themselves  and  the  clothes  they 
wore.  It  was  our  practice  to  keep  two  scouts  two 
or  three  days  in  advance  of  the  command,  and 
between  them  and  the  main  body  four  or  five 
other  scouts.  The  Indian  scouts  in  advance 
would  locate  the  camp  of  the  hostiles  and  send 
back  word  to  the  next  party,  who  in  their  turn 
would  notify  the  main  command;  then  a  forced 
march  would  be  made  in  order  to  surround  and 
surprise  the  camp.  On  the  day  mentioned,  fol 
lowing  this  method  of  procedure,  we  located  the 
Indians  on  the  Yaqui  River  in  a  section  of  the 
country  almost  impassable  for  man  or  beast  and 
40 


The  Indian  Fighter 


in  a  position  which  the  Indians  evidently  felt  to 
be  perfectly  secure.  The  small  tableland  on 
which  the  camp  was  located  bordered  on  the  Yaqui 
River  and  was  surrounded  on  all  sides  by  high 
cliffs  with  practically  only  two  points  of  entrance, 
one  up  the  river  and  the  other  down.  The  officers 
were  able  to  creep  up  and  look  down  on  the  Indian 
camp  which  was  about  two  thousand  feet  below 
their  point  of  observation.  All  the  fires  were 
burning,  the  horses  were  grazing  and  the  Indians 
were  in  the  river  swimming  with  evidently  not  the 
slightest  apprehension  of  attack.  Our  plan  was 
to  send  scouts  to  close  the  upper  opening  and 
then  to  send  the  infantry,  of  which  I  had  the 
command,  to  attack  the  camp  from  below. 

"Both  the  Indians  and  the  infantry  were  in 
position  and  advanced  on  the  hostile  camp,  which, 
situated  as  it  was  on  this  tableland  covered  with 
canebrake  and  boulders,  formed  an  ideal  position 
for  Indian  defense.  As  the  infantry  moved  for 
ward  the  firing  of  the  scouts  was  heard,  which  led 
us  to  believe  that  the  fight  was  on,  and  great,  ac 
cordingly,  was  our  disgust  to  find,  on  our  arrival, 
that  the  firing  was  accounted  for  by  the  fact  that 
41 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  scouts  were  killing  the  stock,  the  Apaches 
themselves  having  escaped  through  the  northern 
exit  just  a  few  minutes  before  their  arrival.  It 
was  a  very  narrow  escape  for  the  Indians,  and  was 
due  to  mere  accident.  One  of  their  number,  who 
had  been  out  hunting,  discovered  the  red  headband 
of  one  of  our  scouts  as  he  was  crawling  around 
into  position.  He  immediately  dropped  his  game 
and  notified  the  Apaches,  and  they  were  able  to 
get  away  just  before  the  scouts  closed  up  the  exit. 
Some  of  these  Indians  were  suffering  from  old 
wounds.  Natchez  himself  was  among  this  number, 
and  their  sufferings  through  the  pursuit  which 
followed  led  to  their  discouragement  and,  finally, 
to  their  surrender." 

The  persistent  action  of  our  troops  was  begin 
ning  to  have  its  effect,  and  when  the  Indians  ceased 
to  commit  depredations  it  was  good  evidence  to 
those  who  knew  Indians  and  Indian  nature  that 
they  were  beginning  to  think  of  surrender. 

One  night  the  troops  ran  into  a  Mexican  pack- 
train,  which  brought  the  first  reports  that  Indians 
were  near  Fronteras,  a  little  village  in  Sonora. 
Two  of  their  women  had  come  into  town  to  find  the 


The  Indian  Fighter 


wife  of  an  old  Mexican  who  was  with  the  Ameri 
cans  as  a  guide,  hoping,  through  her,  to  open  up 
communications  looking  to  a  surrender.  As  soon 
as  the  report  was  received  Captain  Lawton  sent 
Lieutenant  Gatewood  of  the  Sixth  Cavalry,  who 
had  joined  the  command,  with  two  friendly 
Apaches  of  the  same  tribe  as  those  who  were  out 
on  the  warpath,  to  go  ahead  and  send  his  men  into 
the  hostile  camp  and  demand  their  surrender. 
This  he  eventually  succeeded  in  doing,  but  the 
Indians  refused  to  surrender,  saying  that  they 
would  talk  only  with  Lawton,  or,  as  they  expressed 
it,  "the  officer  who  had  followed  them  all  sum 
mer."  This  eventually  led  to  communication  be 
ing  opened  and  one  morning  at  daybreak  Geroni- 
mo,  Natchez  and  twelve  other  Indians  appeared 
in  camp.  Their  inclinations  seemed  at  least  to  be 
peaceful  enough  to  allow  the  entire  body  of  Indians 
to  come  down  and  camp  within  two  miles  of  the 
Americans.  It  was  agreed  that  they  should  meet 
General  Miles  and  formally  surrender  to  him  and 
that  the  Indians  and  the  troops  should  move 
further  north  to  a  more  convenient  meeting  place. 
To  give  confidence  to  the  Indians  in  this  new  state 
43 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

of  affairs,  Captain  Lawton,  Leonard  Wood  and 
two  other  officers  agreed  to  travel  with  them.  Due 
to  a  mistake  in  orders,  the  American  troopers 
started  off  in  the  wrong  direction,  and  Captain 
Lawton  was  obliged  to  leave  in  search  of  them. 
This  left  the  three  remaining  officers  practically 
as  hostages  in  the  Indian  camp.  Speaking  of  this 
incident,  General  Wood  says : 

"Instead  of  taking  advantage  of  our  position, 
they  assured  us  that  while  we  were  in  their  camp 
it  was  our  camp,  and  that  as  we  had  never  lied  to 
them  they  were  going  to  keep  faith  with  us.  They 
gave  us  the  best  they  had  to  eat  and  treated  us 
as  well  as  we  could  wish  in  every  way.  Just 
before  giving  us  these  assurances,  Geronimo  came 
to  me  and  asked  to  see  my  rifle.  It  was  a  Hotch- 
kiss  and  he  had  never  seen  its  mechanism.  When 
he  asked  me  for  the  gun  and  some  ammunition,  I 
must  confess  I  felt  a  little  nervous,  for  I  thought 
it  might  be  a  device  to  get  hold  of  one  of  our 
weapons.  I  made  no  objection,  however,  but  let 
him  have  it,  showed  him  how  to  use  it,  and  he 
fired  at  a  mark,  just  missing  one  of  his  own  men, 
which  he  regarded  as  a  great  joke,  rolling  on  the 
44 


The  Indian  Fighter 


ground,  laughing  heartily  and  saying  'good  gun.' 

"Late  the  next  afternoon  we  came  up  with  our 
command,  and  we  then  proceeded  toward  the 
boundary  line.  The  Indians  were  very  watchful, 
and  when  we  came  near  any  of  our  troops  we 
found  the  Indians  were  always  aware  of  their 
presence  before  we  knew  of  it  ourselves." 

For  eleven  days  Captain  Lawton's  command 
moved  north,  with  Geronimo's  and  Natchez's 
camps  moving  in  a  parallel  course.  During  these 
last  days  of  Geronimo's  leadership  his  greatest 
concern  was  for  the  welfare  of  his  people.  The 
most  urgent  request  that  he  had  to  make  of  Cap 
tain  Lawton  was  to  ask  repeatedly  for  the  assur 
ance  that  his  people  would  not  be  murdered. 

Captain  Lawton  in  his  official  report  says  of 
Wood's  work  in  the  campaign : 

"No  officer  of  infantry  having  been  sent  with 
the  detachment  .  .  .  Assistant  Surgeon  Wood 
was,  at  his  own  request,  given  command  of  the  in 
fantry.  The  work  during  June  having  been  done 
by  the  cavalry,  they  were  too  much  exhausted 
to  be  used  again  without  rest,  and  they  were  left 
in  camp  at  Oposura  to  recuperate. 
45 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

"During  this  short  campaign,  the  suffering  was 
intense.  The  country  was  indescribably  rough 
and  the  weather  swelteringly  hot,  with  heavy  rains 
for  day  or  night.  The  endurance  of  the  men  was 
tried  to  the  utmost  limit.  Diasabilities  resulting 
from  excessive  fatigue  reduced  the  infantry  to 
fourteen  men,  and  as  they  were  worn  out  and 
without  shoes  when  the  new  supplies  reached  me 
July  29th,  they  were  returned  to  the  supply  camp 
for  rest,  and  the  cavalry  under  Lieutenant  A.  L. 
Smith,  who  had  just  joined  his  troop,  continued 
the  campaign.  Heavy  rains  having  set  in,  the 
trail  of  the  hos tiles,  who  were  all  on  foot,  was 
entirely  obliterated. 

"I  desire  particularly  to  invite  the  attention  of 
the  Department  Commander  to  Assistant  Surgeon 
Leonard  Wood,  the  only  officer  who  has  been  with 
me  through  the  whole  campaign.  His  courage, 
energy  and  loyal  support  during  the  whole  time; 
his  encouraging  example  to  the  command  when 
work  was  the  hardest  and  prospects  darkest ;  his 
thorough  confidence  and  belief  in  the  final  successes 
of  the  expedition,  and  his  untiring  efforts  to  make 
46 


The  Indian  Fighter 


it  so,  have  placed  me  under  obligations  so  great 
that  I  cannot  even  express  them." 

Through  the  formal  language  of  a  military 
report  crops  out  the  respect  of  a  commanding 
officer  who  knew  whereof  he  spoke,  the  acknowl 
edgment  that  here  was  a  young  subordinate  who 
never  despaired,  never  gave  up,  who  always  did 
his  part  and  more  than  his  part,  and  who  placed 
his  commanding  officer  under  obligations  which  he 
was  unable  "even  to  express."  That  was  a  great 
deal  for  any  young  man  to  secure.  To-day,  after 
the  Great  War,  there  are  many  such  extracts  from 
official  reports  and  all  are  unquestionably  de 
served.  But  they  are  the  result  of  a  nation 
awakened  to  patriotism  when  all  went  in  together. 
In  1886,  when  the  nation  was  at  peace,  when  com 
mercial  pursuits  were  calling  all  young  men  to 
make  their  fortune,  young  Leonard  Wood  an 
swered  a  much  less  universal  call  to  do  his  work 
in  a  fight  that  had  none  of  the  flare  or  glory  of 
the  front  line  trench  in  Flanders. 

Out  of  it  all  came  to  him  at  a  very  early  age 
practice  in  handling  men  in  rough  country  in 
rough  times — men  who  were  not  puppets  even 
47 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

though  they  were  regular  army  privates.  They 
had  to  be  handled  at  times  with  an  iron  hand,  at 
times  with  the  softest  of  gloves ;  and  an  officer  to 
gain  their  confidence  and  respect  had  to  show 
them  that  he  could  beat  them  at  their  own  game 
and  be  one  of  them — and  still  command. 

The  Congressional  Medal  of  Honor  awarded 
him  years  later  for  this  Indian  work  is  a  fair  re 
turn  of  what  he  accomplished,  for  this  Medal  of 
Honor,  the  then  only  prize  for  personal  bravery 
and  high  fighting  qualities  which  his  country  could 
give  him,  has  always  been  the  rare  and  much 
coveted  award  of  army  men. 

It  was  in  Wood's  case  the  mark  of  conspicuous 
fighting  qualities,  conspicuous  bravery  and  marked 
attention  to  duty — a  sign  of  success  of  a  high 
order  for  a  New  England  doctor  of  twenty-five. 


THE  OFFICIAL 


Ill 

THE  OFFICIAL 

CHANCE  no  doubt  at  times  plays  an  important 
part  in  the  making  of  a  man.  Yet  perhaps  Cas- 
sius'  remark,  through  the  medium  of  Shakespeare, 
that  "The  fault  is  not  in  our  stars  but  in  our 
selves  that  we  are  underlings,"  has  the  truer  ring. 
Chance  no  doubt  comes  to  all  of  us  again  and 
again,  but  it  is  the  brain  that  takes  the  chance 
which  deserves  the  credit  and  not  the  accidental 
event,  opportunity  or  occasion  offering. 

It  was  not  chance  that  sent  Leonard  Wood  to 
Arizona  to  fight  Indians.  It  was  the  result  of  long 
hours  of  meditation  in  Boston  when,  as  a  young 
doctor,  he  decided  finally  to  leave  the  usual  routine 
of  a  physician's  career  and  strike  out  in  another 
and  less  main-traveled  road.  There  was  nothing 
of  luck  or  chance  in  this  decision,  the  carrying  out 
of  which  taught  him  something  that  he  used  later 
to  the  advantage  of  himself  and  his  country. 

Out  of  the  Indian  experiences  came  to  him  in 
51 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  most  vigorous  possible  way  through  actual 
observation  the  necessity  for  bodily  health.  No 
man  could  ride  or  walk  day  in  and  day  out  across 
waterless  deserts  and  keep  his  courage  and  deter 
mination,  to  say  nothing  of  his  good  common 
sense,  without  being  in  the  best  of  physical  condi 
tion.  No  man  could  get  up  in  the  morning  after 
a  terrific  night's  march,  and  collect  his  men  and 
cheer  and  encourage  them  unless  he  was  abso 
lutely  fit  and  in  better  condition  than  they. 

He  learned,  too,  that  all  matters  of  outfit,  care 
of  person,  of  equipment,  of  horses  required  the 
most  constant  attention  day  by  day,  hour  by 
hour.  He  had  to  deal  with  an  enemy  who  be 
longed  to  this  country,  who  knew  and  was  accus 
tomed  to  its  climatic  conditions  as  well  as  its 
topography,  and  he  had  to  beat  him  at  his  own 
game,  or  fail. 

He  learned  that  preparation,  while  it  should 
never  delay  action,  can  never  be  overdone.  This 
must  have  been  drilled  into  the  young  man  by 
the  hardest  and  most  grueling  experiences,  be 
cause  it  has  been  one  of  the  gospels  of  his  creed 
52 


The  Official 


since  that  time  and  is  to  this  day  his  text  upon 
all  occasions. 

He  learned,  too,  something  deeper  than  even 
these  basic  essentials  of  the  fighting  creed.  He 
developed  what  has  always  been  a  part  of  him 
self — the  conviction  that  authority  is  to  be  re 
spected,  that  allegiance  to  superior  officers  and 
government  is  the  first  essential  of  success,  that 
organization  is  the  basis  of  smoothly  running 
machinery  of  any  kind,  and  that  any  weakening 
of  these  principles  is  the  sign  of  decay,  of  failure, 
and  of  disintegration. 

He  learned  that  a  few  men,  well  trained,  thor 
oughly  organized,  fit  and  ready,  can  beat  a  host 
of  individualists  though  each  of  the  latter  may 
excel  in  ability  any  of  the  former,  and  there  is  in 
this  connection  a  curiously  interesting  significance 
in  the  man's  passionate  fondness  throughout  his 
whole  life  for  the  game  of  football.  At  Middle- 
boro,  in  California,  in  service  in  the  South  and 
in  Washington,  he  was  at  every  opportunity  play 
ing  football,  because  in  addition  to  its  physical 
qualities,  this  game  above  all  others  depends  for 
53 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

its  success  upon  organization,  preparation  and 
what  is  called  "team  play." 

Through  these  early  days  it  is  to  be  noted, 
therefore,  as  a  help  in  understanding  his  great 
work  for  his  country  which  came  later  that  his 
sense  of  the  value  of  organization  grew  constantly 
stronger  and  stronger  along  with  a  solid  belief  in 
the  necessity  for  subordination  to  his  superior 
officers  and  through  them  to  his  state  and  his  flag. 
The  respect  which  he  acquired  for  the  agile  In 
dians  went  hand  in  hand  with  the  knowledge  that 
in  the  end  they  could  not  fail  to  be  captured  and 
defeated,  because  they  had  neither  the  sense  of 
organization,  nor  the  intelligence  to  accept  and 
respect  authority  which  not  only  would  have  given 
them  success,  but  would  in  reality  have  made  the 
whole  campaign  unnecessary,  had  the  Indian  mind 
been  able  to  conceive  them  in  their  true  light  and 
the  Indian  character  been  willing  to  observe  their 
never-changing  laws. 

The  result,  however,  was  that  the  spirit  of  the 
Indians  was  broken  by  the  white  man's  relentless 
determination. 

The  hostile  Apaches  were  finally  disposed  of  by 
54 


The  Official 


sending  them  out  of  the  territory.  They  were 
treated  as  prisoners  of  war  and  the  guarantees 
that  General  Miles  had  given  them  as  conditions 
of  surrender  were  respected  by  the  Government, 
although  there  was  a  great  feeling  in  favor  of 
making  them  pay  the  full  penalty  for  their  out 
rages.  President  Grover  Cleveland  expressed  him 
self  as  hoping  that  "nothing  will  be  done  with 
Geronimo  which  will  prevent  our  treating  him  as 
a  prisoner  of  war,  if  we  cannot  hang  him,  which 
I  would  much  prefer." 

At  the  end  of  the  campaign  General  Miles  set 
about  reorganizing  his  command.  For  several 
months  Wood  was  engaged  in  practice  maneuvers. 
The  General  wished  to  expand  his  heliographic 
system  of  signaling,  and  to  that  end  commenced 
an  extensive  survey  of  the  vast  unpopulated  tracts 
of  Arizona,  which  his  troops  might  have  to  cover 
in  time  of  action.  Wood  was  one  of  the  General's 
chief  assistants  in  this  survey,  and  in  1889,  when 
he  was  ordered  away,  he  probably  knew  as  much 
of  Arizona  and  the  southwestern  life  as  any  man 
ever  stationed  there. 

The  orders  which  took  him  from  the  border 
55 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

country  made  him  one  of  the  staff  surgeons  at 
Headquarters  in  Los  Angeles.  This  post  promised 
to  be  inactive  and  uninteresting  but  Captain 
Wood  managed  to  distinguish  himself  in  two  re 
spects,  first  as  a  surgeon  and  second  as  an  athlete. 
This  period  of  his  life  varied  from  month  to  month 
in  some  instances,  but  in  the  main  it  was  the  usual 
existence  of  an  army  official  in  the  capacity  of 
military  surgeon.  It  extended  over  a  period  of 
eleven  years,  from  1887  to  1898.  These  were  the 
eleven  years  between  the  ages  of  twenty-seven  and 
thirty-seven — very  critical  years  in  the  existence 
of  a  man.  It  was  during  these  years  that  he  met 
Miss  Louise  A.  Condit  Smith,  a  niece  of  Chief 
Justice  Field,  who  afterwards  became  his  wife  and 
began  with  him  a  singularly  simple  and  homelike 
family  life  that  is  the  second  of  his  vital  interests 
in  this  world.  He  has  never  allowed  his  family 
life  to  interfere  with  his  service  to  his  country. 
And,  paradoxical  as  it  may  seem,  he  has  never 
allowed  his  lifework  for  his  state  to  interfere  with 
the  happy  and  even  tenor  of  his  home  existence. 
Children  came  in  due  course  and  the  family  unit 
became  complete — that  quiet,  straightforward 
56 


The  Official 


existence  of  the  family  which  is  the  characteristic 
of  American  life  to-day,  as  it  is  of  any  other 
well-organized  civilized  nation. 

In  the  practice  of  his  profession  he  was  able  to 
do  a  lasting1  service  to  his  commanding  officer. 
General  Miles  suffered  a  grave  accident  to  his  leg 
when  a  horse  fell  upon  it.  It  was  the  opinion  of 
the  surgeon  who  attended  him  that  amputation 
would  be  necessary.  But  the  General  was  of  no 
mind  to  beat  a  one-legged  retreat  in  the  midst  of 
a  highly  interesting  and  successful  career.  Cap 
tain  Wood  had  inspired  confidence  in  him  as  an 
Indian  fighter — a  confidence  so  strong  that  he 
thought  it  might  not  be  misplaced  if  it  became 
confidence  in  him  as  a  doctor — and  so  Wood  was 
summoned. 

"They  say  they  will  have  to  cut  off  this  leg,  but 
they  are  not  going  to  do  it,"  said  the  General.  "I 
am  going  to  leave  it  up  to  you.  You'll  have  to 
save  it." 

A  few  weeeks  later  General  Miles  was  up  and 
about,  and  under  his  young  surgeon's  care  the 
wound  healed  and  the  leg  was  saved. 

While  stationed  at  Los  Angeles  headquarters, 
57 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Wood  found  himself  with  enough  time  for  much 
hard  sport.  It  was  a  satisfying  kind  of  life 
after  the  strenuous  months  of  border  service. 

In  1888  he  was  ordered  back  to  the  border 
where  he  served  with  the  10th  Cavalry  in  the 
Apache  Kid  outbreak.  After  a  few  months  of 
active  service,  he  was  ordered  to  Fort  McDowell 
and  then,  in  1889*,  to  California  again. 

From  California  he  was  ordered  to  Fort 
McPherson,  near  Atlanta,  Georgia,  where  he  again 
distinguished  himself  at  football.  He  trained  the 
first  team  in  the  Georgia  Institute  of  Technology, 
became  its  Captain  and  during  the  two  years  of 
his  Captaincy  lost  but  one  game  and  defeated  the 
champion  team  of  the  University  of  Georgia. 

An  incident  has  been  told  by  his  fellow  players 
at  Fort  McPherson  which  shows  exceedingly  well 
a  certain  Spartan  side  to  Wood's  nature.  One 
afternoon  at  a  football  game  he  received  a  deep 
cut  over  one  eye.  He  returned  to  his  office  after 
the  game  and,  after  coolly  sterilizing  his  instru 
ment  and  washing  the  wound,  stood  before  a 
mirror  and  calmly  took  four  stitches  in  his  eyelid. 

Such  were  the  characteristics,  such  the  expe- 
58 


The  Official 


rience,  of  the  young  man  when  in  1895  he  was 
ordered  to  Washington — that  morgue  of  the 
government  official — to  become  Assistant  Attend 
ing  Surgeon.  The  holder  of  this  position  often 
shares  with  the  Navy  Surgeons  the  responsibility 
of  medical  attention  to  the  President,  and  in  ad 
dition  he  acts  as  medical  adviser  to  army  officers 
and  their  families  and  is  the  official  physician  to 
the  Secretary  of  War. 

It  -was  not  an  office  that  appealed  to  Captain 
Wood.  It  could  not;  since  he  was  a  man  essen 
tially  of  out-of-doors,  of  action  and  of  administra 
tion.  Yet  he  seems  to  have  made  such  a  success 
of  the  work  that  he  became  the  personal  friend  of 
both  Cleveland  and  McKinley.  His  relations  with 
President  Cleveland  were  of  the  most  intimate 
sort,  resulting  from  mutual  respect  and  liking  as 
well  as  a  mutual  understanding  on  the  part  of 
both  men  of  the  other's  good  qualities.  He  saw 
him  in  the  White  House  at  all  hours  of  the  day 
and  night ;  saw  him  with  his  family  and  his  children 
about  him;  noted  their  fondness  for  their  father 
and  his  devotion  to  them.  It  was  a  quality  so 
marked  in  Lincoln,  so  strong  in  most  great  men 
59 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

of  the  sound,  calm,  fearless,  administrative  sort. 
Wood  himself  has  exhibited  the  same  quality  in 
his  own  family.  And  in  those  days  the  perfect 
understanding  of  the  father  and  his  children,  the 
simple  family  life  that  went  on  in  the  splendid 
old  house  in  Washington  which  combined  the 
dignity  of  a  State  and  the  simplicity  of  a  home 
unequaled  by  any  great  ruler's  house  upon  this 
earth — all  tended  to  bring  out  this  native  quality 
in  the  President's  medical  adviser. 

It  was  at  the  conclusion  of  Cleveland's  second 
term  that  Wood  was  assigned  to  this  position. 
On  one  of  the  President's  trips  for  recreation  and 
rest — a  shooting  expedition  on  the  inland  waters 
near  Cape  Hatteras — he  was  one  of  the  party 
which  included  also  Admiral  Evans  and  Captain 
Lamberton.  The  hours  spent  in  shooting  boxes  or 
in  the  evenings  in  the  cabin  of  the  lighthouse 
tender  gave  opportunity  for  him  to  study  Cleve 
land  off  duty  when  the  latter  liked  to  sit  quietly 
and  talk  of  his  early  life,  of  his  political  battles, 
of  fishing,  shooting,  and  of  the  urgent  questions 
which  beset  him  as  President.  And  Wood  brought 
away  with  him  a  profound  respect  for  the  combi- 
60 


The  Official 


nation  of  simplicity  and  unswerving  love  and  de 
votion  to  his  country,  coupled  with  rugged  un 
compromising  honesty  which  seem  to  have  been 
the  characteristics  of  Grover  Cleveland. 

This  particular  trip  was  immediately  after  the 
inauguration  ceremonies  of  President  McKinley, 
and  Cleveland  was  not  only  tired  from  the  neces 
sary  part  which  he  himself  had  taken  in  them,  but 
also  from  the  first  natural  let-down  after  four 
years  of  duty  in  the  White  House.  Wood  has 
given  a  little  sketch  of  the  man: 

"I  remember  very  well  his  words,  as  he  sat 
down  with  a  sigh  of  relief,  glad  that  it  was  all 
over.  He  said:  'I  have  had  a  long  talk  with 
President  McKinley.  He  is  an  honest,  sincere  and 
serious  man.  I  feel  that  he  is  going  to  do  his  best 
to  give  the  country  a  good  administration.  He 
impressed  me  as  a  man  who  will  have  the  best 
interests  of  the  people  at  heart.' 

"Then  he  stopped,  and  said  with  a  sigh:  *I 
envy  him  to-day  only  one  thing  and  that  was  the 
presence  of  his  own  mother  at  his  inauguration. 
I  would  have  given  anything  in  the  world  if  my 
mother  could  have  been  at  my  inauguration,' 

61 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

and  then,  continuing:  'I  wish  him  well.  He  has 
a  hard  task/  and  after  a  long  pause :  'But  he  is 
a  good  man  and  will  do  his  best.' ' 

He  has  spoken  often,  too,  of  Cleveland's  love  of 
sport,  of  the  days  which  Jefferson,  the  actor,  and 
Cleveland  spent  together  fishing  and  shooting  on 
and  near  Buzzard's  Bay — the  same  spot  where 
he  himself  as  a  boy  spent  his  days  in  like  occupa 
tions.  The  sides  of  Cleveland's  character  that 
appealed  to  him  were  the  frankness  with  which  he 
expressed  his  views  on  the  important  questions  of 
the  day,  the  sterling  worth  and  high  ideals  which 
emphasized  his  sense  of  duty,  his  love  of  country 
and  his  desire  to  do  the  best  possible  for  his  fellow 
citizens,  coupled  with  his  perfectly  unaffected 
family  feelings  and  the  amazing  devotion  and 
affection  which  he  invariably  elicited  from  all 
those  who  came  into  association  with  him,  even 
to  the  most  humble  hand  on  the  light  house 
tender.  Jeffersonian  simplicity  could  have  gone 
no  further,  nor  could  any  man  liave  been  more 
definite,  far-sighted  and  fearless  than  was  Cleve 
land  in  his  Venezuelan  Message.  These  two  ex 
tremes  made  a  vivid  and  lasting  impresssion  upon 
62 


The  Official 


the  young  man,  because  both  sides  struck  a  sym 
pathetic  chord  in  his  own  nature. 

There  followed,  then,  the  same  association  with 
McKinley,  growing  out  of  the  necessary  intimacy 
of  physician  and  patient.  But  in  this  latter  case 
two  events,  vital  to  this  country  as  well  as  to  the 
career  of  Leonard  Wood,  changed  the  quiet  course 
of  Washington  official  life  to  a  life  of  intense 
interest  and  great  activity. 

These  two  events  were  Wood's  meeting  with 
Theodore  Roosevelt  and  the  Spanish  War. 

One  night  in  1896  at  some  social  function  at 
the  Lowndes  house  Wood  was  introduced  to  Roose 
velt,  then  assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy.  It 
seems  strange  that  two  men  so  vitally  alike  in 
many  ways,  who  were  in  college  at  about  the  same 
time,  should  never  have  met  before.  But  when 
they  did  meet  the  friendship,  which  lasted  without 
a  break  until  Roosevelt's  death,  began  at  once. 

That  night  the  two  men  walked  home  together 
and  in  a  few  days  they  were  hard  at  it,  walking, 
riding,  playing  games  and  discussing  the  affairs 
of  the  day. 

This  strange  fact  of  extraordinary  similarities 
63 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

and  vivid  differences  in  the  two  men  doubtless 
had  much  to  do  with  bringing  them  together  and 
keeping  them  allied  for  years.  Both  were  essen 
tially  men  of  physical  action,  both  born  fighters, 
both  filled  with  an  amazing  patriotism  and  both 
simple  family  men. 

On  the  one  hand,  Roosevelt  was  a  great  indi 
vidualist.  He  did  things  himself.  He  no  sooner 
thought  of  a  thing  than  he  carried  it  out  himself. 
When  he  was  President  he  frequently  issued 
orders  to  subordinates  in  the  departments  without 
consulting  the  heads  of  the  departments.  Wood, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  distinctly  an  organizer  and 
administrator.  When  he  later  filled  high  official 
positions,  he  invariably  picked  men  to  attend  to 
certain  work  and  left  them,  with  constant  consul 
tation,  to  do  the  jobs  whatever  they  were.  If  a 
road  was  to  be  built,  he  found  the  best  road  builder 
and  laid  out  the  work  for  him  leaving  to  him  the 
carrying  out  of  the  details. 

Yet  again  both  men  had  known  life  in  the  West, 
Roosevelt  as  a  cowboy  and  Wood  as  an  Indian 
fighter.  Both  had  come  from  the  best  old  Ameri 
can  stock,  Roosevelt  from  the  Dutch  of  Manhat- 
64 


The  Official 


tan  and  Wood  from  New  England.  They  were 
Harvard  men  and  lovers  of  the  outdoor,  strenuous 
life.  Their  ideals  and  aspirations  had  much  in 
common  and  they  were  both  actuated  by  the  in 
tense  feeling  of  nationalism  that  brought  them  to 
the  foreground  in  American  life. 

Soon  they  were  tramping  through  the  country 
together  testing  each  other's  endurance  in  good- 
natured  rivalry.  When  out  of  sight  of  officialdom, 
they  ran  foot  races  together,  jumped  fences  and 
ran  cross-country.  Both  men  had  children  and 
with  these  they  played  Indians,  indulging  in  most 
exciting  chases  and  games.  They  explored  the 
ravines  and  woods  all  about  Washington,  some 
times  taking  on  their  long  hikes  and  rides  various 
army  officers  stationed  at  Washington.  Few  of 
these  men  were  able  to  stand  the  pace  set  by  the 
two  energetic  athletes,  and  it  was  of  course  par 
tially  due  to  this  fact  that  Roosevelt  in  later  years 
when  he  was  President  ordered  some  of  the 
paunchy  swivel-chair  Cavalry  and  Infantry  offi 
cers  out  for  cross-country  rides  and  sent  them 
back  to  their  homes  sore  and  blistered,  and  with 
65 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

every  nerve  clamoring  for  the  soothing  restfulness 
of  an  easy  chair. 

Wood  was  dissatisfied  in  Washington,  bored 
with  the  inaction.  He  longed  for  the  strenuous 
life  of  the  West.  The  desire  became  so  strong 
that  he  began  a  plan  to  leave  the  army  and  start 
sheep-ranching  in  the  West.  It  was  the  life,  or  as 
near  the  life  as  he  could  get,  that  he  had  been 
leading  for  years;  and  the  present  contrast  of 
those  days  in  the  open  with  the  life  he  was  now 
leading  in  Washington  became  too  much  for  him. 

Here  again  seemed  to  arise  a  turning  point. 
Had  it  not  been  for  his  own  confident  conviction 
that  war  was  eventually  coming  with  Spain,  Wood 
would  probably  have  gone  to  his  open  life  on  the 
prairie.  What  this  would  have  meant  to  his  future 
career  nobody  can  tell,  nor  is  speculation  upon  the 
subject  very  profitable.  But  it  is  interesting  to 
note  that  what  deterred  him  were  his  ideas  on 
patriotism  and  a  man's  duty  to  his  country,  which 
struck  a  live,  vibrating  chord  also  in  Theodore 
Roosevelt's  nature  and  influenced  Wood  to  stay 
in  his  position  and  wait. 

It  is  only  possible  to  imagine  now  the  conver- 
66 


The  Official 


sations  of  these  two  kindred  spirits  on  this  sub 
ject.  Roosevelt,  as  is  well  known,  was  for  war — 
war  at  once — and  he  did  what  little  was  done  in 
those  days  to  prepare.  There  must  have  been 
waging  a  long  argument  between  the  now  expe 
rienced  Indian  fighter  and  doctor,  and  the  great 
hearted  American  who  knew  so  little  of  military 
affairs. 

These  talks  and  arguments  became  so  frank  and 
outspoken  that  they  were  well-known  in  Wash 
ington  circles.  Even  President  McKinley  used  to 
say  to  Wood: 

"Have  you  and  Theodore  declared  war  yet?" 

And  Wood's  answer  was: 

"No,  we  think  you  ought  to,  Mr.  President." 

As  each  day  passed  it  seemed  more  likely  that 
Spain  and  America  would  become  involved  over 
the  injustices  that  Cuba  and  the  Philippines  were 
being  forced  to  suffer  at  the  hands  of  their  greedy 
and  none  too-loving  mother  country.  On  their 
long  walks  they  discussed  all  the  phases  of  such 
a  conflict  and  each  of  them  became  anxious  for 
war  without  further  delay,  for  delay  was  costing 
time  and  money,  and  peaceful  readjustment  seemed 

67 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

quite  out  of  the  question.  So  keen  had  they  be 
come  in  this  war  question  that  the  two  of  them 
became  known  in  Washington  as  the  "War 
Party." 

It  was  becoming  evident  to  many  others  that 
war  was  inevitable  when  the  destruction  of  the 
Maine  in  Havana  Harbor  brought  the  situation 
to  a  head.  It  found  both  these  men  prepared  in 
their  own  minds  as  to  what  their  courses  should 
be.  When  Wood  arrived  at  Fort  Huachuca  in 
1885  he  was  asked  by  Lawton  why  he  came  into 
the  army.  Lawton  had  studied  law  at  Harvard 
after  the  Civil  War  and  was  interested  in  the 
views  of  a  man  who  had  studied  medicine  there. 
Wood  replied  that  he  had  come  into  the  army  to 
get  into  the  line  at  the  first  opportunity;  and 
from  that  moment  he  began  systematically  his 
preparation  for  transfer.  As  a  part  of  this  policy 
he  took  every  opportunity  to  do  line  duty.  The 
result  was  that  when  the  Spanish  War  came  he 
had  strong  letters  from  Lawton,  General  Miles, 
General  Graham,  Colonel  Wagner,  General  For- 
sythe,  and  others,  recommending  him  for  line 
command.  These  recommendations  varied  from 
68 


The  Official 


a  battalion  to  a  regiment.  Both  Roosevelt  and 
Wood  had  discussed  the  possibility  of  organizing 
regiments,  Roosevelt  in  New  York  and  Wood  in 
Massachusetts,  but  as  turmoil  and  confusion  en 
veloped  the  War  Office  they  realized  that  this  plan 
was  not  feasible. 

The  efforts  of  Roosevelt's  superiors  to  keep  him 
in  his  official  capacity  as  Assistant  Secretary  of 
the  Navy  and  away  from  active  service  were  fruit 
less.  Finally,  when  it  became  evident  that  he 
would  go  into  the  service  and  see  active  fighting, 
Secretary  of  War  Alger  offered  him  the  colonelcy 
of  a  regiment  of  cavalry.  Roosevelt,  because  of 
his  lack  of  experience  in  military  affairs,  refused 
the  offer  but  agreed  to  accept  the  position  of 
lieutenant  colonel  of  such  a  regiment  if  his 
friend,  Leonard  Wood,  would  accept  the 
colonelcy.  Secretary  Alger  and  Leonard  Wood 
agreed,  and  work  was  commenced  at  once  organiz 
ing  a  regiment  that  was  later  to  become  known  as 
the  Rough  Riders.  The  official  name  of  the  regi 
ment  was  the  1st  Volunteer  Cavalry.  The  name 
Rough  Riders  "just  grew."  The  organization 
became  known  under  that  name  among  the  friends 
69 


The  Caieer  of  Leonard  Wood 

of  its  leaders,  later  among  the  newspaper  corre 
spondents  and  consequently  the  public,  and 
finally  when  it  appeared  in  official  documents  it 
was  accepted  as  official. 

Preparedness  was  all  too  unknown  in  those 
days,  but  Wood,  who  became  its  nation-wide 
champion  in  the  days  to  come,  was  well  schooled 
even  in  those  days  in  its  laws.  He  only  learned 
more  as  time  went  on.  The  chaos  and  tangle  of 
red  tape,  inefficiency,  unpreparedness  in  all 
branches  of  the  service  blocked  every  effort  that 
a  few  efficient  and  able  men  were  making.  Seeing 
the  hopelessness  of  trying  to  accomplish  anything 
under  such  conditions  Wood  introduced  a  novel 
method  of  organization  into  the  War  Depart 
ment. 

Instead  of  pestering  the  hopeless  and  dismayed 
functionaries  of  the  various  Government  depart 
ments  with  requests  for  things  they  did  not  have 
and  would  not  have  been  able  to  find  if  they  did 
have  them,  Wood  merely  requested  carte  blanche 
to  go  ahead  and  get  all  necessary  papers  ready  so 
that  they  might  be  signed  at  one  sitting.  He 
made  requisitions  for  materials  that  he  needed 
70 


The  Official 


and  when  these  materials  were  not  to  be  found  in 
the  Government  stores  he  wrote  out  orders  di 
rected  to  himself  for  the  purchase  in  the  open 
market  of  the  things  required.  Alger  recognized 
immediately  that  in  Wood  he  had  a  man  accus 
tomed  to  action  and  full  of  vision — a  man  whom 
nothing  could  frighten.  The  two  men  understood 
one  another.  If  those  who  surrounded  the  Secre 
tary  of  War  in  those  days  had  been  as  capable  of 
organization,  the  history  of  Washington  during 
wartime  would  have  been  quite  different.  But  for 
the  most  part  they  failed.  The  see-nothing,  hear- 
nothing,  do-nothing,  keep-your-finger-on-your- 
number  spirit  among  many  of  them  was  quite 
great  enough  to  throw  the  War  Office  into  chaos. 
The  game  of  "passing  the  buck"  did  not  appeal  to 
Wood;  neither  did  he  stop  to  sympathize  with  a 
certain  highly  placed  bureaucrat  who  complained : 

"My  office  and  department  were  running  along 
smoothly  and  now  this  damned  war  comes  along 
and  breaks  it  all  up." 

When   all  of  his  papers   and  documents  were 
ready,  Wood  appeared  before  Secretary  Alger. 
71 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

"And  now  what  can  I  do  for  you?"  said  the 
Secretary. 

"Just  sign  these  papers,  sir.  That  is  all,"  re 
plied  the  Rough  Riders'  Colonel. 

Alger,  beset  by  incompetence,  hampered  by  in 
efficiency  in  his  staff,  was  dumbfounded  as  he 
looked  through  the  papers  Wood  had  prepared  for 
him  to  sign.  There  were  telegrams  to  Governors 
of  states  calling  upon  them  for  volunteers; 
requisitions  for  supplies  and  uniforms ;  orders  for 
mobilization  and  requisitions  for  transportation. 
Alger  had  little  to  say.  He  placed  enough  confi 
dence  in  Wood  to  sign  the  papers  and  give  him 
his  blessing. 

When  the  army  depots  said  that  they  could  not 
supply  uniforms,  Wood  replied  that  his  men  could 
wear  canvas  working  clothes.  As  a  result  the 
Rough  Riders,  fighting  through  the  tropical  coun 
try  in  Cuba,  were  far  more  comfortable  than  the 
soldiers  in  regulation  blue.  The  new  colonel 
seemed  to  know  what  he  wanted.  He  wanted  Krag 
rifles.  There  were  few  in  existence,  but  General 
Flagler,  Chief  of  Ordnance,  appreciated  what  the 
young  officer  had  done  and  saw  that  he  got  them. 
72 


The  Official 


He  did  not  want  sabers  for  the  men  to  run  through 
one  another  in  the  pandemonium  of  cavalry 
charges  of  half  wild  western  horses.  The  Rough 
Riders  therefore  went  into  action  carrying  ma 
chetes,  an  ideal  weapon  for  the  country  in  which 
they  were  to  see  service.  With  the  saber  they 
could  do  nothing ;  but  with  the  machete  they  could 
do  everything  from  hacking  through  dense  jungle 
growths  to  sharpening  a  pencil.  During  the  days 
that  followed  many  troopers  equipped  with  sabers 
conveniently  lost  them,  but  Wood's  Rough  Riders 
found  the  machetes  invaluable. 

The  authority  to  raise  the  regiment  was  given 
late  in  April,  and  on  the  twenty-fourth  day  of 
June,  against  heavy  odds,  it  won  its  first  action 
in  the  jungles  at  Las  Guasimas.  This  was  quick 
work,  when  it  is  remembered  that  two  weeks  of 
that  short  six  or  seven  week  period  were  practically 
used  up  in  assembling  and  transporting  the  men 
by  rail  and  sea.  Here  is  where  organization  and 
well-thought-out  plans  made  a  remarkable  showing. 

It  was  not  only  a  question  of  knowing  what  he 
wanted.  It  was  his  old  slogan :  "Do  it  and  don't 
talk  about  it." 

73 


THE  SOLDIER 


IV 

THE  SOLDIER 

THE  name  "Rough  Riders"  will  forever  mean  to 
those  who  read  American  history  the  spontaneous 
joy  of  patriotism  and  the  high  hearts  of  youth  in 
this  land.  It  was  the  modern  reality  of  the  ad 
venturous  musketeers — of  those  who  loved  ro 
mance  and  who  were  ready  for  a  call  to  arms  in 
support  of  their  country.  They  came  from  the 
cowboys  of  the  west,  from  the  stockbrokers'  offices 
of  Wall  Street,  from  the  athletic  field,  from  youth 
wherever  real  youth  was  to  be  found.  Something 
over  20,000  men  applied  for  enrollment.  None  of 
them  knew  anything  of  war.  None  of  them 
wanted  to  die,  but  they  all  wanted  to  try  the  great 
adventure  under  such  leaders.  And  they  have 
left  an  amazing  record  of  the  joyousness  of  the 
fight  and  the  recklessness  that  goes  with  it. 

Now  and  then  there  have  been  organizations  of 
a  similar  character  in  our  history,  but  only  here 
and  there.  It  was  the  first  outburst  of  that  day 
77 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

of  the  spirits  filled  with  high  adventure;  and  the 
record  cheers  the  rest  of  us  as  we  plod  along  our 
way,  just  as  it  cheers  us  when  we  are  ill  in  bed 
with  indigestion  to  read  again  the  old  but  ever- 
young  Dumas. 

It  would  have  been  impossible  for  any  one  to 
have  organized  and  controlled  such  a  group  with 
out  the  enthusiasm  of  men  like  Roosevelt  and 
Wood,  as  well  as  the  knowledge  these  two  had  of 
the  West,  the  Southwest  and  the  South. 

It  detracts  nothing  from  Roosevelt's  greatness 
of  spirit  to  say  that  it  was  Wood  who  did  the 
organizing,  the  equipping  of  the  regiment.  In 
fact  Roosevelt  declined  to  be  the  Rough  Riders' 
first  Colonel,  but  consented  to  be  the  second  in 
command  only  if  Wood  were  made  its  commander. 
The  fact  that  Roosevelt  was  not  only  known  in 
the  East  but  in  the  Northwest,  and  that  Wood 
was  quite  as  well  known  in  the  Southwest  and  the 
South  meant  that  men  of  the  Rough  Riders  type 
all  over  the  country  knew  something  of  one  or  the 
other  of  the  regiment's  organizers. 

It  detracts  nothing  from  Wood's  amazing  ac 
tivity  in  organization  and  capacity  for  getting 
78 


The  Soldier 


things  done,  to  say  that  had  it  not  been  for  Roose 
velt's  wonderful  popularity  amongst  those  of  the 
youthful  spirit  of  the  land  the  regiment  would 
never  have  had  its  unique  character  or  its  unique 
name. 

This  is  not  the  place  to  tell  the  story  of  that 
famous  band  of  men.  But  its  organization  is  so 
important  a  part  of  Wood's  life  that  it  comes  in 
for  mention  necessarily. 

In  the  Indian  campaign  with  the  regulars  he 
had  known  the  great  importance  of  being  properly 
outfitted  and  ready  for  those  grilling  journeys 
over  the  desert.  In  the  Spanish  War  he  learned, 
as  only  personal  experience  can  teach,  the  amaz 
ing  importance  of  preparation  for  volunteers  and 
inexperienced  men.  The  whole  story  of  the  get 
ting  ready  to  go  to  Cuba  was  burned  into  his 
brain  so  deeply  that  it  formed  a  second  witness 
in  the  case  against  trusting  to  luck  and  the  occa 
sion  which  has  never  been  eradicated  from  his 
mind.  Yet  this  episode  brought  strongly  before 
him  also  the  fact  that  prepared  though  he  might 
be  there  was  no  success  ahead  for  such  an  organi 
zation  without  the  sense  of  subordination  to  the 
79 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

state  and  the  nation  which  not  only  brought  the 
volunteers  in,  but  carried  them  over  the  rough 
places  through  disease  and  suffering  and  death  to 
the  end. 

Eight  days  after  the  telegram  calling  upon  the 
Governors  of  New  Mexico,  Arizona,  Oklahoma 
and  Indian  Territory  for  men  to  form  the  regi 
ment,  the  recruits  gathered  at  San  Antonio  where 
Wood  was  waiting  to  meet  them.  The  most  im 
portant  thing  about  them  for  the  moment  was 
that  they  knew  nothing  of  military  life.  Wood 
believed  with  Old  Light-Horse  Harry  Lee  "That 
Government  is  a  murderer  of  its  citizens  which 
sends  them  to  the  field  uninformed  and  untaught, 
where  they  are  meeting  men  of  the  same  age  and 
strength  mechanized  by  education  and  disciplined 
for  battle." 

Furthermore  during  the  years  that  he  had  been 
in  Washington  Wood  had  used  some  of  his  spare 
time  in  studying  parts  of  American  history  that 
are  not  included  in  school  books.  He  knew  that 
the  volunteer  system  in  the  Revolutionary  War 
had  worn  General  Washington  sick  with  discour 
agement  and  fear  lest  all  that  he  had  built  up  be 
80 


The  Soldier 


broken  down  through  lack  of  discipline.  He  knew 
also  that  in  the  Civil  War  the  volunteer  system 
proved  inadequate  on  both  sides  and  that  it  was 
not  until  the  war  had  gone  on  for  two  years  that 
either  the  North  or  the  South  had  what  could 
properly  be  called  an  army. 

To  aid  him  in  the  training  of  these  troops  he 
had  the  assistance  of  a  number  of  officers  who 
had  seen  service  in  the  Regular  Army,  and  to 
gether  they  mapped  out  a  course  of  drills  and 
maneuvers  that  worked  the  men  from  a  valueless 
mob  into  a  regiment  trained  for  battle.  The  hu 
man  material  that  they  had  to  work  with  was  the 
best;  for  these  men  had  been  selected  from  many 
applicants.  The  lack  of  discipline  and  the  igno 
rance  of  military  etiquette  led  to  many  amusing 
incidents.  Colonel  Roosevelt  in  his  history  of 
the  Rough  Riders  tells  of  an  orderly  announcing 
dinner  to  Colonel  Wood  and  the  three  majors  by 
remarking  genially : 

"If  you  fellers  don't  come  soon,  everything'll 
get  cold." 

The  foreign  attaches  said :  "Your  sentinels  do 
not  know  much  about  the  Manual  of  Arms,  but 
81 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

they  are  the  only  ones  through  whose  lines  we 
could  not  pass.  They  were  polite;  but,  as  one  of 
them  said,  'Gents,  I'm  sorry,  but  if  you  don't 
stop  I  shall  kill  you.' " 

The  difficulties  to  be  surmounted  were  enor 
mous  ;  and  any  officers  less  democratic  and  under 
standing  might  have  made  a  mess  of  it.  Both 
Roosevelt  and  Wood  understood  the  frontiersmen 
too  well  to  misjudge  any  breaches  of  etiquette 
or  to  humiliate  the  extremely  sensitive  natures  of 
men  long  used  to  life  in  the  open. 

Upon  Colonel  Wood  fell  practically  all  the 
details  of  organization.  There  were  materials  and 
supplies  of  many  kinds  to  be  secured  from  the 
War  Department;  there  were  men  to  be  drilled 
in  the  bare  rudiments  of  military  life;  non-com 
missioned  officers  and  officers  to  be  schooled,  and 
a  thousand  and  one  other  details.  At  first  the 
men  were  drilled  on  foot,  but  soon  horses  were 
purchased  and  mounted  drill  commenced,  much 
to  the  delight  of  many  of  the  cowpunchers  who 
by  years  of  training  had  become  averse  to  walking 
a  hundred  yards  if  they  could  throw  their  legs 
over  a  horse.  There  was  no  end  to  the  excite- 
82 


The  Soldier 


ment  when  the  horses  arrived.  Most  of  them  were 
half-broken,  but  there  were  some  that  had  never 
seen,  much  less  felt,  a  saddle.  The  horses  were 
broken  to  the  delight  of  every  one  in  camp,  be 
cause  training  them  meant  bucking  contests,  and 
the  more  vicious  the  animal  the  better  they 
liked  it. 

From  simple  drills  and  evolutions  the  men  ad 
vanced  to  skirmish  work  and  rapidly  became  real 
soldiers — not  the  polished,  smartly  uniformed 
military  men  of  the  Regular  type,  but  hard  fight 
ers  in  slouch  hats  and  brown  canvas  trousers  with 
knotted  handkerchiefs  round  their  necks. 

The  commander  of  any  military  unit  at  that 
time  had  much  to  worry  about.  It  depended 
solely  on  him  personally  whether  his  men  were 
properly  equipped,  whether  they  had  food;  and 
when  orders  came  to  move  whether  they  had  any 
thing  to  move  on.  The  advice  that  he  could  get, 
if  he  was  willing  to  listen  to  it,  was  lengthy  and 
worthless,  and  the  help  he  could  get  from  Wash 
ington  amounted  to  little  or  nothing. 

In  May  the  regiment  was  ordered  to  proceed 
to  Tampa.  After  a  lengthy  struggle  with  the 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

railway  authorities  cars  were  put  at  the  disposal 
of  Colonel  Wood,  who  left  San  Antonio  on  the 
29th  with  three  sections,  the  remaining  four  sec 
tions  being  left  to  proceeed  later  in  charge  of 
Lieutenant-Colonel  Rooosevelt.  The  confusion  of 
getting  started  was  reduced  to  a  minimum  by 
Wood,  who  had  worked  out  a  scheme  for  em 
barkation;  but  due  to  delay  on  the  part  of  the 
railway  authorities  in  providing  proper  facilities 
for  handling  the  troops  and  equipment  they  were 
delayed  four  days.  Everywhere  along  the  line  of 
travel  they  were  cheered  enthusiastically  by  peo 
ple  who  came  to  greet  the  train  on  its  arrival  in 
towns  and  cities. 

Tampa  was  in  chaos.  There  seemed  to  be  no 
order  or  system  for  the  disembarkation  of  troops. 
Every  one  asked  for  information  and  no  one  could 
give  it.  Officers,  men,  railroad  employees  and 
longshoremen  milled  about  in  a  welter  of  con 
fusion.  The  troops  were  dumped  out  with  no 
prearranged  schedule  on  the  part  of  the  officers 
in  charge  of  the  camp.  There  were  no  arrange 
ments  for  feeding  the  men  and  no  wagons  in  which 
to  haul  impedimenta.  In  such  conditions  it  re- 
84 


The  Soldier 


quired  all  the  native  vigor  characteristic  of  their 
Colonel  to  bring  some  sort  of  order — all  the 
knowledge  he  had  gained  from  his  Indian  cam 
paign.  And  even  then  there  was  still  needed  an 
unconquerable  spirit  that  did  not  know  what 
impossibilities  were. 

After  a  few  days  at  Tampa,  Colonel  Wood  was 
notified  that  his  command  would  start  for  destina 
tion  unknown  at  once,  leaving  four  troops  and  all 
the  horses  behind  them.  On  the  evening  of  June 
7th  notification  came  that  they  would  leave  from 
Port  Tampa,  nine  miles  away,  the  following  morn 
ing,  and  that  if  the  troops  were  not  aboard  the 
transport  at  that  time  they  could  not  sail.  No 
arrangements  were  made  by  the  port  authorities 
for  the  embarkation.  No  information  could  be 
obtained  regarding  transportation  by  rail  to  the 
port.  There  was  no  information  regarding  the 
transport  that  the  troops  were  to  use.  In  an 
official  report  made  to  the  Secretary  of  War 
Colonel  Roosevelt  had  the  following  remarks  to 
make  about  the  conditions  that  confronted  them 
in  Tampa: 

".  .  .  No  information  was  given  in  advance 
85 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

what  transports  we  should  take,  or  how  we  should 
proceed  to  get  aboard,  nor  did  any  one  exercise 
any  supervision  over  the  embarkation.  Each 
regimental  commander,  so  far  as  I  know,  was  left 
to  find  out  as  best  he  could,  after  he  was  down  at 
the  dock,  what  transport  had  not  been  taken,  and 
then  to  get  his  regiment  aboard  it,  if  he  was  able, 
before  some  other  regiment  got  it.  Our  regiment 
was  told  to  go  to  a  certain  switch  and  take  a  train 
for  Port  Tampa  at  twelve  o'clock,  midnight.  The 
train  never  came.  After  three  hours  of  waiting, 
We  were  sent  to  another  switch,  and  finally  at  six 
o'clock  in  the  morning  got  possession  of  some  coal 
cars  and  came  down  in  them.  When  we  reached 
the  quay  where  the  embarkation  was  proceeding, 
everything  was  in  utter  confusion.  The  quay 
was  piled  with  stores  and  swarming  with  thousands 
of  men  of  different  regiments,  besides  onlookers, 
etc.  The  Commanding  General,  when  we  at  last 
found  him,  told  Colonel  Wood  and  myself  that  he 
did  not  know  what  ship  we  were  to  embark  on,  and 
that  we  must  find  Colonel  Humphrey,  the  Quarter 
master  General.  Colonel  Humphrey  was  not  in 
his  office,  and  nobody  knew  where  he  was.  The 

86 


The  Soldier 


commanders  of  the  different  regiments  were  busy 
trying  to  find  him,  while  their  troops  waited  in 
the  trains,  so  as  to  discover  the  ships  to  which 
they  were  allotted — some  of  these  ships  being  at 
the  dock  and  some  in  mid-stream.  After  a  couple 
of  hours'  search,  Colonel  Wood  found  Colonel 
Humphrey  and  was  allotted  a  ship.  Immediately 
afterward  I  found  that  it  had  already  been  al 
lotted  to  two  other  regiments.  It  was  then  coming 
to  the  dock.  Colonel  Wood  boarded  it  in  mid 
stream  to  keep  possession,  while  I  double-quicked 
the  men  down  from  the  cars  and  got  there  just 
ahead  of  the  other  two  regiments.  One  of  these 
regiments,  I  was  afterward  informed,  spent  the 
next  thirty-six  hours  in  cars  in  consequence." 

The  conditions  at  Tampa  provided  material  for 
a  spirited  exchange  of  letters  and  telegrams  be 
tween  General  Miles,  who  had  taken  command, 
and  Secretary  of  War  Alger. 

On  June  4th,  General  Miles  filed  by  telegraph 
the  following  report  to  the  Secretary  of  War : 

"Several  of  the  volunteer  regiments  came  here 
without  uniforms ;  several  came  without  arms,  and 
some  without  blankets,  tents,  or  camp  equipage. 
87 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

The  32d  Michigan,  which  is  among  the  best,  came 
without  arms.      General  Guy  V.   Henry   reports 
that  five  regiments  under  his   command  are  not 
fit  to  go  into  the  field.    There  are  over  three  hun 
dred   cars   loaded  with   war   material   along   the 
roads    about   Tampa.      Stores    are    sent    to   the 
Quartermaster  at  Tampa,  but  the  invoices   and 
bills  of  lading  have  not  been  received,  so  that  the 
officers  are  obliged  to  break  open  seals  and  hunt 
from  car  to  car  to  ascertain  whether  they  contain 
clothing,   grain,    balloon   material,   horse    equip 
ments,  ammunition,  siege  guns,  commissary  stores, 
etc.     Every  effort  is  being  made  to  bring  order 
out  of  confusion.     I  request  that  rigid  orders  be 
given  requiring  the  shipping  officers  to  forward  in 
advance  complete  invoices  and  bills  of  lading,  with 
descriptive  marks  of  every  package,  and  the  num 
ber  and  description  of  car  in  which  shipped.     To 
illustrate  the  embarrassment   caused  by  present 
conditions,  fifteen  cars  loaded  with  uniforms  were 
sidetracked  twenty-five  miles   from   Tampa,   and 
remained  there  for  weeks  while  the  troops  were 
suffering    for    clothing.      Five    thousand    rifles, 
which  were  discovered  yesterday,  were  needed  by 
88 


The  Soldier 


several  regiments.  Also  the  different  parts  of 
the  siege  train  and  ammunition  for  same,  which 
will  be  required  immediately  on  landing,  are  scat 
tered  through  hundreds  of  cars  on  the  sidetracks 
of  the  railroads.  Notwithstanding  these  difficul 
ties,  this  expedition  will  soon  be  ready  to  sail." 

In  answer  to  this  dispatch  was  sent  the  fol 
lowing  reply  from  Secretary  Alger: 

"Twenty  thousand  men  ought  to  unload  any 
number  of  cars  and  assort  contents.  There  is 
much  criticism  about  delay  of  expedition.  Better 
leave  a  fast  ship  to  bring  balance  of  material 
needed,  than  delay  longer." 

This  slight  difference  of  opinion  which  a  shrewd 
observer  can  discover  between  the  lines  was  char 
acteristic  of  the  whole  preparation  of  the  United 
States  army  that  undertook  to  carry  on  the  war 
with  Spain.  As  one  remembers  those  days,  or 
reads  of  them  in  detail,  it  seems  as  if  every  one  did 
something  wrong  regularly,  as  if  no  one  of  ability 
was  anywhere  about.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  how 
ever,  the  organizing  and  shipping  of  a  suddenly 
acquired  expeditionary  volunteer  force  has  never 
been  accomplished  in  any  other  way.  The  truth 
89 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

of  the  matter  is  that  it  can  never  be  run  properly 
at  the  start  for  the  simple  reason  that  there  is 
no  organization  fitted  to  carry  out  the  details. 

The  officials  in  Washington  who  had  to  do  with 
the  army — good  men  in  many  cases,  poor  men  in 
some  cases — if  they  had  been  in  office  long  had 
been  handling  a  few  hundred  men  here  and  there 
in  the  forts,  on  the  plains,  or  at  the  regular  mili 
tary  posts.  They  could  no  more  be  molded  into 
a  homogeneous  whole  than  could  the  cowboys, 
stockbrokers,  college  athletes,  and  southern  plant 
ers  maneuver  until  they  had  been  drilled. 

To  Colonel  Wood,  busy  most  of  the  hours  of  the 
day  and  night  trying  to  get  order  out  of  chaos 
in  his  small  part  of  the  great  rush,  the  whole  epi 
sode  was  a  graphic  demonstration  of  the  need  of 
getting  ready.  Many  years  later  a  much-adver 
tised  politician  of  our  land  said  that  an  army  was 
not  necessary  since  immediately  upon  the  need 
for  defense  of  our  country  a  million  farmers  would 
leave  their  plows  and  leap  to  arms.  To  an  officer 
trying  to  find  a  transport  train  in  the  middle  of 
the  night  with  a  thousand  hungry,  tired,  half- 
trained  men  under  him  such  logic  might  well  have 
90 


The  Soldier 


caused  a  smile,  if  nothing  worse.  Leave  his  plow 
at  such  a  call  the  American  Citizen  will — and  by 
the  millions,  if  need  be.  He  has  done  just  that  in 
the  last  two  years.  He  will  leap  to  arms — to 
continue  the  rhetoric — but  what  can  he  do  if  he 
finds  no  arms,  or  if  they  do  not  exist  and  cannot 
be  made  for  nine  months? 

But  the  thing  was  not  new  to  Wood  even  in 
those  days.  As  he  talks  of  that  period  now  he 
says  that  it  was  not  so  bad.  There  was  food, 
rough,  but  still  food,  and  enough.  There  were 
transports.  It  only  needed  that  they  be  found. 
If  you  could  not  get  uniforms  of  blue,  take  uni 
forms  of  tan.  If  you  could  not  find  sabers,  go 
somewhere,  in  or  out  of  the  country,  and  buy 
them  or  requisition  them  and  put  in  the  charge 
later. 

Yet,  even  so,  no  man  in  such  a  position,  going 
through  what  he  went  through,  worrying  hour  by 
hour,  could  fail  to  see  the  object  lesson  and  take 
the  first  opportunity  when  peace  was  declared  to 
begin  to  preach  the  necessity  for  getting  ready 
for  the  next  occasion.  And  it  was  largely  due  to 
Leonard  Wood,  as  the  world  well  knows,  that  what 
91 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

little  preparation  was  made  in  1915  and  1916  in 
advance  of  the  United  States  declaring  war  was 
made  at  all.  It  was  the  lessons  acquired  in  the 
Spanish  War  and  in  the  study  of  other  wars  that 
made  of  him  the  great  prophet  of  preparedness. 

For  several  days  the  troops  remained  aboard 
the  transport  in  Tampa  harbor  awaiting  orders. 
The  heat  and  discomfort  told  upon  the  men,  but 
on  the  evening  of  June  13th  orders  came  to  start 
and  the  next  morning  found  them  at  sea.  On  the 
morning  of  the  20th  the  transport  came  off  the 
Cuban  coast ;  but  it  was  not  until  the  22d  that  the 
welcome  order  for  landing  came.  The  troops 
landed  at  the  squalid  little  village  of  Daiquiri  in 
small  boats,  while  the  smaller  war  vessels  shelled 
the  town. 

In  the  afternoon  of  the  next  day,  the  Rough 
Riders  received  orders  to  advance ;  and  Wood, 
leading  his  regiment,  pushed  on  so  as  to  be  sure 
of  an  engagement  with  the  enemy  the  next  morn 
ing.  It  was  due  to  his  energy  that  the  Rough 
Riders  did  not  miss  the  first  fight.  Under  General 
Young's  orders  the  Rough  Riders  took  up  a  posi- 


The  Soldier 


tion  at  the  extreme  left  of  the  front.  The  next 
day  the  action  of  "Las  Guasimas"  began. 

"Shoot — don't  swear,"  growled  Wood  as  the 
fighting  began.  He  strolled  about  encouraging 
his  men  and  urging  them  to  action.  Under  his 
quiet,  cool  direction  they  advanced  slowly,  forcing 
the  enemy  back,  and  finally  driving  him  to  his 
second  line  of  defense.  Soon  the  Rough  Riders' 
right  joined  the  left  of  the  main  body  and  in  a 
concerted  attack  the  Spaniards  were  routed,  leav 
ing  much  of  their  equipment  in  their  hasty  retreat. 

At  this  juncture  it  was  reported  to  Roosevelt, 
whose  detachment  was  separate  from  that  of 
Wood,  that  Wood  had  been  killed.  Roosevelt 
immediately  began  taking  over  the  command  of 
the  entire  regiment,  since  it  naturally  devolved 
upon  him.  As  he  was  consolidating  his  troops  he 
came  upon  Wood  himself  very  much  alive. 

Major-General  Joseph  Wheeler  made  the  fol 
lowing  report  of  the  Rough  Riders: 

"Colonel  Wood's  Regiment  was  on  the  extreme 

left  of  the  line,  and  too  far-distant  for  me  to  be 

a  personal  witness  of  the  individual  conduct  of 

his  officers  and  men ;  but  the  magnificent  and  brave 

93 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

work  done  by  the  regiment,  under  the  lead  of 
Colonel  Wood,  testifies  to  his  courage  and  skill. 
The  energy  and  determination  of  this  officer  had 
been  marked  from  the  moment  he  reported  to  me 
at  Tampa,  Fla.,  and  I  have  abundant  evidence  of 
his  brave  and  good  conduct  on  the  field,  and  I 
recommend  him  for  consideration  of  the  Govern 
ment." 

On  the  25th,  General  Young  was  stricken  by 
the  fever  and  Wood  took  charge  of  the  brigade  on 
the  30th,  leaving  Roosevelt  in  command  of  the 
Rough  Riders.  The  afternoon  of  the  30th  brought 
orders  to  march  on  Santiago,  and  the  morning  of 
July  1st  found  them  in  position  three  miles  from 
the  city,  with  Leonard  Wood  commanding  the 
second  dismounted  cavalry  brigade.  During  the 
next  two  days,  the  enemy  fought  fiercely  to  regain 
his  lost  positions,  but  the  cool  persistence  of  the 
American  troops  forced  him  constantly  back 
ward. 

In    endorsing   Wood's    report   of   this    action, 

General  Wheeler  said,  "He  showed  energy,  courage, 

and  good  judgment.     I  heretofore  recommended 

him  for  promotion  to  a  Brigadier-General.     He 

94 


The  Soldier 


deserves  the  highest  commendation.  He  was 
under  the  observation  and  direction  of  myself  and 
of  my  staff  during  the  battle." 

After  a  short  siege  the  Spanish  command  capit 
ulated  on  the  afternoon  of  July  17th  and  the 
American  forces  entered  Santiago. 

Wood's  promotion  to  Brigadier-General  of  the 
United  States  Volunteers  came  at  once,  and 
Roosevelt  was  made  Colonel  and  placed  in  com 
mand  of  the  2d  Cavalry  Brigade. 

The  condition  of  our  forces  at  this  time,  strug 
gling  against  the  unaccustomed  and  virulent  dan 
gers  of  the  tropics,  was  pitiable.  The  "Round 
Robin"  incident  in  which  the  commanding  officers 
of  the  various  divisions  in  the  command  reported 
to  Major-General  W.  R.  Shafter,  that  "the 
Army  must  be  moved  at  once,  or  it  will  perish," 
has  become  a  part  of  the  record  of  the  history  of 
those  times.  Whether  the  sickness  and  disease 
they  suffered  could  have  been  prevented  became 
a  matter  of  great  controversy. 

This  "Round  Robin"  was  a  document  signed 
by  practically  all  general  officers  present,  in  order 
to  bring  to  the  attention  of  the  War  Department 
95 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  conditions  existing  in  the  army  that  had  cap 
tured  Santiago  showing  that  it  was  suffering 
severely  from  malaria  and  yellow  fever ;  that  these 
men  must  be  replaced ;  and  that  if  they  were  not 
replaced  thousands  of  lives  would  be  lost.  It  was 
sent  because  instructions  from  Washington  clearly 
indicated  that  the  War  Department  did  not  under 
stand  the  conditions,  and  it  was  feared  that  delay 
would  cause  enormous  loss  of  life.  The  men  had 
been  in  mud  and  water — the  yellow  fever  country 
— for  weeks  and  were  thoroughly  infected  with 
malaria.  Although  he  had  signed  the  "Round 
Robin"  with  the  other  officers  General  Wood  later 
on  gave  the  following  testimony  before  the  War 
Investigation  Committee : 

"We  had  never  served  in  that  climate,  so  pe 
culiarly  deadly  from  the  effects  of  malaria,  and 
in  this  respect  my  opinions  have  changed  very 
much  since  the  close  of  the  war.  If  I  had  been 
called  before  you  in  the  first  week  of  August,  I 
might  have  been  disposed  to  have  answered  a  little 
differently  in  some  respects.  I  have  been  there 
ever  since,  and  have  seen  regiments  come  to  Cuba 
in  perfect  health  and  go  into  tents  with  floors  and 
96 


The  Soldier 


with  flies  camped  up  on  high  hills,  given  boiled 
water,  and  have  seen  them  have  practically  the 
identical  troubles  we  had  during  the  campaign. 
The  losses  may  not  have  been  as  heavy,  as  we  are 
organized  to  take  them  into  hospitals  protected 
from  the  sun  which  seemed  to  be  a  depressing 
cause.  All  the  immune  regiments  serving  in  my 
department  since  the  war  have  been  at  one  time 
or  another  unfit  for  service.  I  have  had  all  the 
officers  of  my  staff  repeatedly  too  sick  for  duty. 
I  don't  think  that  any  amount  of  precaution  or 
preparation,  in  addition  to  what  we  had,  would 
have  made  any  practical  difference  in  the  sick 
ness  of  the  troops  of  the  army  of  invasion.  This 
is  a  candid  opinion,  and  an  absolutely  frank  one. 
If  I  had  answered  this  question  in  August,  with 
out  the  experience  I  have  had  since  August,  I 
might  have  been  disposed  to  attribute  more  to  the 
lack  of  tentage  than  I  do  now;  but  I  think  the 
food,  while  lacking  necessarily  in  variety,  was 
ample." 

Only  a  few  years  later  the  explanation  of  yellow 
fever  transmission  became  clear  to  all  the  world. 
This  discovery  and  the  definite  methods  of  protec- 
97 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

tion  against  its  spread  and  the  spread  of  malaria 
were  largely  the  result  of  Wood's  administrative 
ability  and  his  knowledge  of  medicine.  For  it  was 
as  the  result  of  studies  and  experiments  conducted 
under  his  direct  supervision  that  it  became  known 
that  yellow  fever  was  the  result  of  the  bite  of  the 
mosquito  and  not  of  bad  food  or  low,  marshy 
country  or  bad  air  or  any  of  the  other  factors 
which  had  so  long  been  supposed  to  be  its  cause. 
The  taking  of  Santiago  practically  ended  the 
Spanish  War.  But  for  the  military  commander 
of  the  City  of  Santiago  it  began  a  new  and  epoch- 
making  work. 


THE  ORGANIZER 


V 

THE  ORGANIZER 

To  understand  the  work  accomplished  by 
Wood  in  Santiago,  it  is  necessary  to  renew  our 
picture  of  the  situation  existing  in  Cuba  at  the 
time  and  to  realize  as  this  is  done  that  the  prob 
lem  was  an  absolutely  new  one  for  the  young 
officer  of  thirty-seven  to  whom  it  was  presented. 

Nobody  can  really  conceive  of  the  unbelievable 
condition  of  affairs  unless  he  actually  saw  it  or 
has  at  some  time  in  his  life  witnessed  a  corre 
sponding  situation.  Those  who  return  from  the 
battlefields  on  the  Western  Front  of  the  Great 
War  describe  the  scenes  and  show  us  pictures  and 
we  think  we  realize  the  horrors  of  destruction,  yet 
one  after  another  of  us  as  we  go  there  comes  back 
with  the  same  statement:  "I  had  heard  all  about 
it,  but  I  hadn't  the  least  conception  of  what  it 
really  was  until  I  saw  it  with  my  own  eyes." 

In  like  manner  we  who  are  accustomed  to  reason 
ably  clean  and  well-policed  cities  can  call  up  no 
101 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

real  picture  of  what  the  Cuban  cities  were  in  those 
days,  unless  we  saw  them,  or  something  like  them. 

Yet  in  spite  of  this  it  is  necessary  to  try  to  give 
some  idea  of  the  fact,  in  order  to  give  some  idea 
of  the  work  of  reorganization  required. 

For  four  hundred  years  Cuba  had  been  under 
the  Spanish  rule — the  rule  of  viceroys  and  their 
agents  who  came  of  a  race  that  has  for  centuries 
been  unable  to  hold  its  own  among  the  nations  of 
the  earth.  Ideas  of  health,  drainage,  sanitation, 
orderly  government,  systematic  commercial  life — 
all  were  of  an  order  belonging  to  but  few  spots  in 
the  world  to-day.  Here  and  there  in  the  East — 
perhaps  in  what  has  been  called  the  "cesspool  of 
the  world,"  Guayaquil,  Ecuador — and  in  other 
isolated  spots  there  are  still  such  places,  but  they 
are  fortunately  beginning  to  disappear  as  perma 
nent  forms  of  human  life. 

In  Santiago  there  were  about  50,000  inhab 
itants.  These  people  had  been  taxed  and  abused 
by  officials  who  collected  and  kept  for  themselves 
the  funds  of  the  Province.  Fear  of  showing  wealth, 
since  it  was  certain  to  be  confiscated,  led  all 
classes  of  families  to  hide  what  little  they  had. 
102 


The  Organizer 


Money  for  the  city  and  its  public  works  there  was 
none,  since  all  was  taken  for  the  authorities  in 
Spain  or  for  their  representatives  in  Cuba. 
Spanish  people  in  any  kind  of  position  treated  the 
natives  as  if  they  were  slaves — as  indeed  they 
were.  No  family  was  sure  of  its  own  legitimate 
property,  its  own  occupation  and  its  own  basic 
rights.  The  city  government  was  so  administered 
as  to  deprive  all  the  citizens  of  any  respect  for  it 
or  any  belief  in  its  statements,  decrees  or  laws. 
Not  only  was  this  condition  of  affairs  in  existence 
at  the  time  of  the  war  but  it  had  existed  during 
the  entire  lifetime  of  any  one  living  and  during 
the  entire  lifetime  of  his  father,  grandfather  and 
ancestors  for  ten  generations. 

As  a  result  no  Cuban  had  any  conception  of 
what  honest  government,  honest  administration, 
honest  taxation,  honest  dealings  were.  He  not 
only  had  no  conception  of  such  things  but  he 
believed  that  what  his  family  for  generations  and 
he  during  his  life  had  known  was  the  actual  situa 
tion  everywhere  throughout  the  world.  He  knew 
of  nothing  else. 

The  city  had  no  drainage  system  except  the 
103 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

open  gutter  of  the  streets — never  had  had.  The 
water  system  consisted  of  an  elemental  sort  of 
dam  six  miles  up  in  the  hills  outside  the  city,  old, 
out  of  repair,  constantly  breaking  down,  and  a 
single  11-inch  pipe  which  had  a  capacity  of 
200,000  gallons  a  day  for  the  city — something  like 
four  gallons  to  a  person.  This  was  not  sufficient 
for  more  than  one-quarter  of  each  day.  In  other 
words  the  city  at  the  best  was  receiving  for  years 
only  one-quarter  of  the  water  it  absolutely  needed 
for  cleanliness. 

Plagues  and  epidemics,  smallpox,  yellow  fever, 
bubonic  plague,  typhus  and  tetanus  followed  one 
another  in  regular  succession.  The  streets  for 
years  had  contained  dead  animals  and  many  times 
in  epidemics  dead  human  beings — sights  to  which 
the  citizens  had  been  so  accustomed  throughout 
their  lives  that  they  paid  no  attention  to  them. 
The  authorities  being  accustomed  to  keeping  the 
public  moneys  for  their  own  use  spent  little  or 
nothing  upon  public  works,  cleaning  the  streets 
or  making  improvements.  They  did  not  build; 
they  did  not  replace;  they  only  patched  and  re 
paired  when  it  was  absolutely  necessary.  It  was 


The  Organizer 


a  situation  difficult  to  conceive,  impossible  to 
realize.  Yet  one  must  constantly  bear  in  mind 
that  there  not  only  appeared  to  be  nothing  out  of 
the  ordinary  in  this,  but  in  reality  there  was 
nothing  out  of  the  ordinary.  It  was  the  accus 
tomed,  usual  thing  and  had  been  so  for  centuries. 

The  sense  of  personal  responsibility  to  the  com 
munity  was  not  dormant;  it  did  not  exist.  The 
sense  of  duty  of  those  who  governed  to  those 
whom  they  governed  was  not  repressed  by  modern 
corruption  only ;  it  had  ceased  to  exist  altogether. 
No  city  official  was  expected  to  do  anything  but 
get  what  he  could  out  of  those  under  him.  No 
citizen  knew  anything  but  the  necessity — to  him 
the  right — of  concealing  anything  he  had,  of 
deceiving  everybody  whom  he  could  deceive  and 
of  evading  any  law  that  might  be  promulgated. 

The  integrity  of  the  family  and  its  right  to  live 
as  it  chose  within  restrictions  required  by  gre 
garious  existence  had  disappeared — never  had 
existed  at  all  so  far  as  those  living  knew.  The 
responsibility  of  the  individual  to  his  govern 
ment  was  unconceivable  and  inconceivable. 

Had  all  this  not  been  so  there  would  have  been 
105 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

no  war  on  our  part  with  Spain,  for  the  whole 
origin  of  the  trouble  which  eventually  led  to  war 
grew  out  of  the  final  despair  of  men  and  women 
in  Cuba  who  gradually  came  to  realize  in  a  dim 
way  that  something  was  wrong  and  unfair.  Out 
of  this  grew  internal  dissension  which  constantly 
spilled  over  to  interfere  with  international  rela 
tions. 

It  was  the  inevitable  breaking  down  of  a  civili 
zation  because  of  the  years  during  which  civiliza 
tion's  laws  had  been  disregarded,  and  because  all 
this  took  place  in  close  proximity  to  a  country 
where  the  reverse  was  the  evident  fact.  There 
are  such  rotten  spots  still  upon  this  earth — one 
just  across  our  doorstep  on  the  Rio  Grande,  and 
somebody  some  day  must  clean  that  house,  too. 

Added  to  all  this,  and  much  more,  was  the  fact 
that  the  city  of  Santiago  had  been  besieged  by 
land  and  by  sea.  Thus  naturally  even  the  con 
ditions  in  this  cesspool  were'' intensely  exagger 
ated. 

Into  such  a  plague-stricken,  starving  city  on 
the  20th  of  July,  1898,  Wood,  then  Brigadier 
General  of  United  States  Volunteers,  thirty-seven 
106 


The  Organizer 


years  of  age,  fresh  from  the  job  of  army  surgeon 
to  the  President  in  the  White  House,  some  Indian 
fighting  in  the  Southwest  and  the  task  of  getting 
the  Rough  Riders  organized  into  fighting  shape — 
fresh  from  the  fighting  that  had  taken  place  on 
and  since  July  1st — into  this  situation  on  July 
20th  General  Wood  was  summoned  by  General 
Shafter,  commanding  the  American  forces,  with 
the  information  that  he  had  been  detailed  to  take 
command  of  the  city,  secure  and  maintain  order, 
feed  the  starving  and  reorganize  generally. 

Why  he  was  selected  may  be  easily  guessed.  He 
was  a  military  man  who  had  made  good  recently, 
who  had  made  good  in  the  Southwest,  whom  the 
President  knew  and  trusted — and  he  was  a  doc 
tor  who  had  just  shown  great  organizing  ability. 
The  job  itself  was  as  new  to  him  as  would  have 
been  the  task  in  those  days  of  flying.  But  with 
his  inherited  and  acquired  sense  of  values,  of  the 
essentials  of  life,  with  his  education  and  his  char 
acteristic  passion  for  getting  ready  he  started  at 
once  to  pull  off  the  wall  paper,  hammer  away  the 
plaster  and  examine  the  condition  of  the  beams 
which  supported  this  leaning,  tottering,  out-of 
107 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

repair  wing1  of  the  world's  house  of  civilization. 

What  he  found  was  rotten  beams ;  no  integrity 
of  family ;  no  respect  for  or  responsibility  to  the 
state ;  no  sense  on  the  part  of  the  citizens  of  what 
they  owed  to  themselves,  or  their  families,  or  their 
city — not  the  slightest  idea  of  what  government 
of  the  people  for  the  people  by  the  people  meant. 
The  government  was  robbing  the  family.  The 
family  was  robbing  the  government.  That  »was 
the  fundamental  place  to  begin,  if  this  wing  of  the 
house  was  not  to  fall. 

Naturally  the  immediate  and  crying  needs  had 
to  be  corrected  at  once.  But  Wood  began  all  on 
the  same  day  on  the  beams  as  well  as  on  the 
plaster  and  wall  paper — this  20th  day  of  July, 
1898.  Another  man  might  well  have  forgotten 
or  never  have  thought  of  the  fundamentals  in  the 
terrible  condition  within  his  immediate  vision. 
That  seems  to  be  the  characteristic  of  Wood — 
that  while  he  started  to  cure  the  illness,  he  at  the 
same  time  started  to  get  ready  to  prevent  its  re 
currence.  And  there  we  may  perhaps  discover 
something  of  the  reason  for  his  success,  some 
thing  of  the  reason  why  people  lean  on  him  and 
108 


The  Organizer 


look  to  him  for  advice  and  support  in  time  of 
trouble. 

These  immediate  needs  were  inconceivable  to 
those  who  lived  in  orderly  places  and  orderly  times. 
Of  the  50,000  inhabitantants,  15,000  were  sick. 
There  were  in  addition  2,000  sick  Spanish  soldiers 
and  5,000  sick  American  troops.  Over  all  in  the 
hot  haze  of  that  tropical  city  hung  the  terror  of 
yellow  fever,  showing  its  sinister  face  here  and 
there.  At  the  same  time  a  religious  pilgrimage 
to  a  nearby  shrine  taken  at  this  moment  by  18,000 
people  led  to  an  immense  increase  in  disease  be 
cause  of  the  bad  food  and  the  polluted  water 
which  the  pilgrims  ate  and  drank.  In  the  streets 
piles  of  filth  and  open  drains  were  mixed  with 
the  tU«4  bodies  of  animals.  Houses,  deserted  be 
cause  of  deaths,  held  their  dead — men,  women  and 
children — whom  no  one  removed  and  no  one  buried. 
All  along  the  routes  approaching  the  city  bodies 
lay  by  the  roadside,  the  living  members  of  the 
family  leaving  their  dead  unburied  because  they 
were  toor  weak  and  could  only  drag  themselves 
along  under  the  tropic  sun  in  the  hope  that  they 
109 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

might  reach  their  homes  before  they,  too,  should 
die. 

This  was  enhanced  by  the  fact  of  the  siege  and 
the  consequent  lack  of  food.  The  sick  could  not 
go  for  food ;  and  if  they  could  have  done  so  there 
was  little  or  none  to  be  had.  Horrible  odors 
filled  the  air.  Terror  walked  abroad.  It  was 
a  prodigious  task  for  anybody  to  undertake,  but 
it  was  undertaken,  and  in  the  following  manner: 

Simultaneously  certain  main  lines  of  work  were 
mapped  out  by  Wood  and  officers  put  in  charge 
of  each  subject,  the  commanding  officer  reserving 
for  himself  the  planning,  the  general  supervision, 
the  watching,  as  well  as  the  instituting  of  new 
laws  based  upon  the  existing  system  of  the  Code 
Napoleon. 

It  was  first  necessary  to  feed  the  people  and 
to  bury  the  dead.  There  were  so  many  of  the 
latter  that  they  had  to  be  collected  in  lots  of 
ninety  or  a  hundred,  placed  between  railway  irons, 
soaked  in  petroleum  and  burned  outside  the  city. 
It  was  such  dreadful  work,  this  going  into  de 
serted  homes  and  collecting  dead  bodies  for  the 
flames,  that  men  had  to  be  forced  to  it.  All  were 
110 


The  Organizer 


paid  regularly,  however,  and  the  job  was  done. 
General  Wood's  own  account  of  this  task  is  bet 
ter  than  any  second-hand  description  can  even 
hope  to  be. 

"Horrible  deadly  work  it  was,  but  at  last  it 
was  finished.  At  the  same  time  numbers  of  men 
were  working  night  and  day  in  the  streets  remov 
ing  the  dead  animals  and  other  disease-producing 
materials.  Others  were  engaged  in  distributing 
food  to  the  hospitals,  prisons,  asylums  and  con 
vents — in  fact  to  everybody,  for  all  were  starving. 
What  food  there  was,  and  it  was  considerable, 
had  been  kept  under  the  protection  of  the  Span 
ish  army  to  be  used  as  rations.  Some  of  the  far- 
seeing  and  prudent  had  stored  up  food  and  pre 
pared  for  the  situation  in  advance,  but  these  were 
few. 

"All  of  our  army  transportation  was  engaged 
in  getting  to  our  own  men  the  tents,  medicines 
and  the  thousand  and  one  other  things  required 
by  our  camps,  and  as  this  had  to  be  done  through 
seas  of  mud  it  was  slow  work.  We  could  expect 
no  help  from  this  source  in  our  distribution  of 
rations  to  the  destitute  population,  so  we  seized 
111 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

all  the  carts  and  wagons  we  could  find  in  the 
streets,  rounded  up  drivers  and  laborers  with  the 
aid  of  the  police,  and  worked  them  under  guard, 
willing  or  unwilling,  but  paying  well  for  what 
they  did.  At  first  we  had  to  work  them  far  into 
the  night. 

"Everything  on  wheels  in  the  city  was  at  work. 
Men  who  refused  and  held  back  soon  learned  that 
there  were  things  far  more  unpleasant  than  cheer 
ful  obedience,  and  turned  to  work  with  as  much 
grace  as  they  could  command.  All  were  paid  a 
fair  amount  for  their  services,  partly  in  money, 
partly  in  rations,  but  all  worked ;  some  in  remov 
ing  the  waste  refuse  from  the  city,  others  in  dis 
tributing  food.  Much  of  the  refuse  in  the  streets 
was  burned  outside  at  points  designated  as  crema 
tories.  Everything  was  put  through  the  flames. 

"In  the  Spanish  military  hospital  the  number 
of  sick  rapidly  increased.  From  2,000  when  we 
came  in,  the  number  soon  ran  up  to  3,100  in  hos 
pital,  besides  many  more  in  their  camps.  Many 
of  the  sick  were  suffering  from  malaria,  but 
among  them  were  some  cases  of  yellow  fever. 
Poor  devils,  they  all  looked  as  though  hope  had 


The  Organizer 


fled,  and,  as  they  stood  in  groups  along  the  water 
front,  eagerly  watching  the  entrance  to  the  har 
bor,  it  required  very  little  imagination  to  see  that 
their  thoughts  were  of  another  country  across  the 
sea,  and  that  the  days  of  waiting  for  the  trans 
ports  were  long  days  for  them."  * 

A  yellow  fever  hospital  was  established  on  an 
island  in  the  harbor.  The  city  was  divided  into 
districts  and  numbers  of  medical  men  put  in 
charge,  their  duty  being  to  examine  each  house 
and  report  sanitary  conditions,  sickness  and  food 
situations.  As  a  result  of  these  reports  Wood 
issued  orders  for  action  in  each  district  so  that 
the  food,  the  available  medical  force  and  the  sup 
plies  of  all  kinds  should  be  used  and  distributed 
to  produce  the  greatest  results  in  the  shortest 
possible  time.  In  one  district  alone  just  outside 
the  city  there  were  thousands  of  cases  of  small 
pox  in  November.  The  streets  were  filled  with 
filth  and  dead  and  wrecked  furniture.  The  wells 
were  full  of  refuse.  The  task  seemed  almost  hope 
less.  Yet,  under  Wood's  system  of  detailing 
squads  to  undertake  the  work  in  certain  sections 
*Scnbner's  Magazine. 

113 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

with  the  system  of  centralized  reporting,  the  epi 
demic  was  checked  in  a  month,  the  district  cleaned 
and  scrubbed  from  end  to  end  with  disinfectants 
and  the  small  pox  cut  down  to  a  few  scattering 
cases.  In  this  district  of  Holguin  the  plan  was 
adopted  of  vaccinating  two  battalions  of  the  Sec 
ond  Immune  Regiment.  These  men  were  then 
sent  into  the  district  to  establish  good  sanitary 
conditions  and  clean  up  the  yellow  fever.  The 
work  was  done  successfully  without  the  occurrence 
of  a  single  case  of  smallpox  amongst  the  American 
troops.  No  better  demonstration  of  the  efficacy 
of  vaccination  was  ever  given. 

Thus  the  first  task  of  feeding  the  starving  pop 
ulation  and  cleaning  the  city  was  simultaneously 
undertaken  by  districts  under  the  direction  of  of 
ficers  having  authority  to  proceed  along  certain 
established  lines.  Episodes  illustrating  these  "es 
tablished  lines"  are  many,  but  there  is  space  here 
for  only  one  or  two  of  them. 

It  developed  at  the  outset  that  there  was  food 

and  meat  in  the  city  which  the  people  could  use, 

but  which  was  beyond  their  reach  on  account  of 

the  high  prices.     General  Wood  no  sooner  heard 

114* 


The  Organizer 


of  this  than  he  "established  a  line  of  procedure" 
to  correct  it.  He  sent  for  the  principal  butchers 
of  the  city  and  asked: 

"How  much  do  you  charge  for  your  meat?" 

"Ninety  cents  a  pound,  Senor." 

"What  does  it  cost  you?" 

There  was  hesitation  and  a  shuffling  of  feet; 
then  one  of  the  men  said  in  a  whining  voice : 

"Meat  is  very,  very  dear,  your  Excellency." 

"How  much  a  pound?" 

"It  costs  us  very  much,  and  .  .  ." 

"How  much  a  pound?" 

"Fifteen  cents,  your  Excellency;  but  we  have 
lost  much  money  during  the  war  and  .  .  ." 

"So  have  your  customers.  Now  meat  will  be 
sold  at  25  cents  a  pound,  and  not  one  cent  more. 
Do  you  understand?" 

Then,  turning  to  the  alderman,  he  charged  him 
to  see  that  his  order  was  carried  out  to  the  let 
ter,  unless  he  wanted  to  be  expelled  from  office. 

Thenceforward  meat  was  sold  in  the  markets  at 
25  cents.  The  same  simple  plan  was  evolved  for 
all  other  kinds  of  supplies.  Naturally  such  high 
handed  methods  caused  a  great  hue  and  cry 
115 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

amongst  certain  of  the  citizens  and  no  such  method 
could  have  been  carried  out  by  any  one  but  a 
military  commander  with  absolute  authority. 
Some  of  the  newspapers,  all  of  which  had  been 
given  a  free  hand  by  Wood  and  were  allowed  for 
the  first  time  to  say  what  they  liked,  started  a 
campaign  against  the  new  administration  and  its 
busy  head.  But  hand  in  hand  with  this  autocratic 
procedure  went  the  organization  of  native  courts, 
the  appointment  of  native  officials  for  carrying 
on  the  government,  native  police  to  catch  Cuban 
bandits  and  native  judges  to  give  decisions  and 
impose  sentences.  Furthermore,  in  these  same 
days  of  autocratic  action,  the  people  gradually 
discovered  that  although  everybody  was  forced  to 
work  all  those  who  did  got  paid — something  new 
to  the  Santiago-Cuban  consciousness — that  the 
invading  American  army  was  not  arresting  na 
tives  in  the  streets  and  thrusting  them  into  jail, 
but  that  their  own  native  police  were  doing  this 
work.  Gradually,  as  the  city  became  clean,  as 
prices  fell,  as  payment  for  work  came  in,  as  ill 
ness  decreased,  as  law  became  fairly  administered 
by  the  Cuban  officials  themselves,  a  certain  awe 
116 


The  Organizer 


and  veneration  grew  for  the  invaders  and  their 
big,  hardworking  head.  It  was  a  revelation,  un 
believable  yet  true,  unknown  yet  a  fact,  which 
opened  up  to  the  minds  of  these  long-suffering,  in 
competent  people  the  first  vision  of  an  existence 
which  has  since  through  the  same  agency  of  Gen 
eral  Wood  become  a  fact  throughout  the  whole 
island,  so  that  Cuba  is  to-day  a  busy,  healthy, 
self-governing  state. 

Parallel  with  the  feeding  and  sanitation  work 
General  Wood  put  into  effect  a  certain  system  of 
road  building  where  it  was  necessary  in  order  to 
keep  the  people  at  work  and  allow  them  to  make 
money  and  at  the  same  time  to  produce  necessary 
transportation  facilities.  Five  miles  of  asphalt 
pavement,  fifteen  miles  of  country  pike,  six  miles 
of  macadam  were  built  and  200  miles  of  country 
road  made  usable  out  of  funds  collected  from  the 
regular  taxes  which  had  heretofore  gone  into  the 
pockets  of  the  Spanish  government  officials.  The 
costs  varied  somewhat  from  the  old  days,  as  may 
well  be  guessed.  A  quarter  of  a  mile  of  macadam 
pavement  built  by  the  Spaniards  the  year  before 
along  the  water-front  had  cost  $180,000.  Wood's 
117 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

engineers  built  five  miles  of  asphalt  pavement  at 
a  cost  of  $175,000. 

At  the  same  time  a  reorganization  of  the  Cus 
tom  House  service  was  instituted  which  increased 
receipts ;  j  ails  and  hospitals  were  reorganized  un 
der  the  system  existing  in  the  United  States ;  and 
perhaps  in  the  end  the  greatest  work  of  all  was 
the  establishment  of  an  entirely  new  school  system 
based  on  an  adaptation  of  the  American  form. 
Teachers  had  disappeared.  There  were  none, 
since  nobody  paid  them.  School  houses  were 
empty,  open  to  any  tramp  for  a  night's  lodging. 
In  a  few  months  this  was  changed  so  that  kinder 
gartens  and  schools  were  opened  and  running. 

In  fact  the  work  was  the  making  of  a  new  com 
munity,  the  building  of  a  new  life — the  repairing 
of  the  tottering  wing  of  the  old,  old  house. 

All  this,  as  may  be  supposed,  did  not  take  place 
without  friction,  obstruction,  and  without  at  first 
a  great  deal  of  bad  blood. 

Wood's  methods  in  dealing  with  disturbances 
were  his  own  and  can  only  be  suggested  here  by 
isolated  anecdotes  and  incidents.  When  an  of 
ficial  who  had  the  Spanish  methods  in  his  blood 
118 


The  Organizer 


did  not  appear  after  three  invitations  he  was  car 
ried  into  the  commanding  officer's  presence  by  a 
squad  of  soldiers  in  his  pajamas.  The  next  time 
he  was  invited  he  came  at  once. 

"One  night  about  eight  o'clock,  General  Wood 
was  writing  in  his  office  in  the  palace.  At  the 
outer  door  stood  a  solitary  sentinel,  armed  with 
a  rifle.  Suddenly  there  burst  across  the  plaza, 
from  the  San  Carlos  Club,  a  mob  of  Cubans — 
probably  500.  Within  a  few  minutes  a  shower 
of  stones,  bricks,  bottles  and  other  missiles  struck 
the  Spanish  Club,  smashing  windows  and  doors. 
A  man,  hatless  and  out  of  breath,  rushed  up  to 
the  sentry  at  the  palace  entrance  and  shouted, 
*  Where's  the  General?  Quick!  The  Cubans  are 
trying  to  kill  the  officers  and  men  in  the  Spanish 
Club!' 

"General  Wood  was  leisurely  folding  up  his 
papers  when  the  sentry  reached  him.  'I  know  it,' 
he  said,  before  the  man  had  time  to  speak.  'I  have 
heard  the  row.  We  will  go  over  and  stop  it.' 

"He  picked  up  his  riding-whip,  the  only  weapon 
he  ever  carries,  and,  accompanied  by  the  one 
American  soldier,  strolled  across  to  the  scene  of 
119 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  trouble.  The  people  in  the  Spanish  Club  had 
got  it  pretty  well  closed  up,  but  the  excited  Cu 
bans  were  still  before  it,  throwing  things  and 
shouting  imprecations,  and  even  trying  to  force 
a  way  in  by  the  main  entrance. 

"  'Just  shove  them  back,  sentry,'  said  General 
Wood,  quietly. 

"Around  swung  the  rifle,  and,  in  much  less  time 
than  is  taken  in  the  telling,  a  way  was  cleared 
in  front  of  the  door. 

66  'Now  shoot  the  first  man  who  places  his  foot 
upon  that  step,'  added  the  General,  in  his  usual 
deliberate  manner.  Then  he  turned  and  strolled 
back  to  the  palace  and  his  writing.  Within  an 
hour  the  mob  had  dispersed,  subdued  by  two  men, 
one  rifle  and  a  riding-whip.  And  the  lesson  is 
still  kept  in  good  memory." 

"One  day  about  the  middle  of  November  the 
native  calentura  or  fever,  from  which  General 
Wood  suffered  greatly,  sent  him  to  his  home,  which 
is  on  the  edge  of  the  town,  earlier  than  usual. 
He  had  no  sooner  reached  the  house  than  he  was 
notified  by  telephone  that  a  bloody  riot  had  oc 
curred  at  San  Luis,  a  town  20  miles  out  on  the 
120 


The  Organizer 


Santiago  Railway.  The  fever  was  raging  in  the 
General,  his  temperature  exceeding  105,  and  he 
was  so  sick  and  dizzy  that  he  staggered  as  he 
walked.  But  with  that  indomitable  will  that  had 
served  him  on  many  a  night  raid  against  hostile 
Apaches,  he  entered  his  carriage  and  was  driven 
back  to  the  city.  He  picked  up  his  chief  signal 
officer,  Captain  J.  E.  Brady,  at  the  Palace  and 
hastened  to  the  building  occupied  by  the  telegraph 
department  of  the  Signal  Corps  on  Calle  En- 
ramadas.  Captain  Brady  took  the  key  at  the 
instrument. 

"  'Tell  the  operator  to  summon  members  of  the 
rural  guard  who  were  fired  on,  and  the  command 
ing  officer  of  the  Ninth  Immunes,'  ordered  the 
General,  tersely.  Thenceforward,  for  three  hours 
General  Wood  sat  there,  questioning,  listening, 
issuing  orders,  all  with  a  promptness  and  cer 
tainty  of  judgment  that  would  have  been  extraor 
dinary  in  a  man  quite  at  his  ease ;  yet  all  the  time, 
as  he  could  not  help  showing  in  mien  and  features, 
the  raging  fever  was  distressing  to  the  point  of 
agony.  Those  about  him  could  not  but  marvel 
at  the  man's  resolution  and  endurance.  The  fol- 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

lowing  day,  although  still  racked  with  fever,  he 
went  by  special  train  to  San  Luis  and  investi 
gated  the  affair  in  person."  * 

The  basis  of  the  great  work,  however,  as  Gen 
eral  Wood  has  himself  repeatedly  said  in  con 
versation  and  in  print,  was  to  effect  all  this  re 
generation  without  causing  the  Cubans  to  look 
upon  the  American  Army  and  the  American  con 
trol  as  they  had  for  years  looked  upon  the  Span 
ish  Army  and  the  Spanish  control.  That  his  suc 
cess  here  in  the  most  difficult  phase  of  the  whole 
prodigious  enterprise  was  absolute  has  been  tes 
tified  to  in  innumerable  ways  and  instances. 

Only  one  or  two  of  these  can  be  given  here,  but 
they  are  illuminating  in  the  extreme  and  they  sug 
gest  the  success  of  the  methods  of  the  man  who 
had  been  put  in  charge  of  this  difficult  work. 

Death  amongst  the  Spanish  soldiers  had  been 
very  heavy  from  yellow  fever  and  pernicious  ma 
laria  and  the  course  of  the  troop-ships  which  car 
ried  them  back  to  Spain  was  marked  by  long 
lists  of  burials  at  sea.  These  ships  carried  with 
them  most  of  the  nurses  and  nursing  sisters  to 

*  Fortnightly  Review. 


The  Organizer 


care  for  the  sick  and  dying  during  the  voyage.  It 
was  a  great  drain  on  the  nursing  force  at  Wood's 
disposal  in  Santiago.  He,  therefore,  hit  upon 
the  idea  of  offering  to  pay  for  the  return  trips  of 
these  nurses  if  they  would  come  back  at  once ;  with 
the  result  that  most  of  them  gladly  accepted  and 
rendered  splendid  service  in  Santiago  to  the  sick 
as  a  token  of  their  appreciation  of  the  military 
governor's  act.  This  did  much  to  establish 
friendly  relations  between  Americans,  Spaniards 
and  Cubans  who  had  so  short  a  time  before  been 
enemies. 

Another  vital  point  was  the  relations  of  the  in 
vaders  with  the  Church.  It  had  never  been  con 
templated  that  a  Catholic  viceroy  should  be  re 
placed  by  a  Protestant.  This  viceroy  had  so 
many  intimate  relations  with  the  Catholic  Church 
in  which  he  represented  the  Catholic  king  that  it 
was  absolutely  necessary  for  whatever  American 
happened  to  be  governor  to  play  the  game  regard 
less  of  what  his  own  religious  scruples  might  be. 
As  an  interesting  example  of  how  well  this  was 
handled  by  Wood  the  story  of  Bishop  Bernaba  is 
a  charming  instance. 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

This  bishop  was  elevated  from  priesthood  while 
Wood  was  governor  and  because  of  his  affection 
and  respect  for  the  American  officer  he  asked  him 
to  walk  with  him  during  the  ceremonious  proces 
sion  from  the  priest's  little  parish  church,  where 
he  had  served,  to  the  old  cathedral  where  he  was 
to  officiate  thereafter.  It  was  a  solemn  religious 
function  and  has  been  described,  because  of  the 
terrific  surroundings  of  the  hour,  as  not  unlike 
the  ceremony  which  took  place  in  Milan  after  the 
Great  Plague. 

The  entire  population  of  the  city  with  some 
forty  or  fifty  thousand  from  the  surrounding  hills 
packed  the  streets  along  the  route  of  the  proces 
sion.  None  of  them  had  had  a  blessing  from  his 
own  Cuban  clergy  in  many  years.  It  was  like  a 
mediaeval  scene.  The  old  bishop  bowed  by  years, 
weakened  by  his  recent  grief  at  the  suffering  of 
his  people  and  by  the  excitement  of  the  moment, 
and  General  Wood,  the  American  Protestant, 
walked  together  under  the  bishop's  canopy.  The 
people  in  the  streets,  seeing  this,  cried:  "Thank 
God,  the  General  is  a  Catholic !  We  didn't  know 
it!" 


The  Organizer 


From  time  to  time  the  old  bishop,  tired  with 
the  exertion  of  swinging  the  censor  with  the  holy 
water,  would  hand  it  to  Wood  and  ask  him  to  con 
tinue  the  function  by  his  side  until  he  could  secure 
a  slight  respite.  Occasionally  as  he  leaned  for 
ward  to  bless  the  thousands  who  lined  the  way 
and  who  had  come  to  feel  his  touch  and  kiss  his 
hand  his  miter  would  slip  to  one  side  on  his  head 
and  the  unperturbed  American  general  would  lean 
forward  and  straighten  it  for  him.  Each  time 
the  old  bishop  turned  to  him  and  murmured, 
"Thank  God,  you  are  here!  I  am  so  old  that  I 
could  not  have  made  this  journey,  if  you  had  not 
been  here  to  help  me." 

Wood  told  him  that  he  was  not  a  Catholic,  that 
indeed  from  Bishop  Bernaba's  point  of  view  he 
was  a  heretic  and  bound  for  Hell. 

"No,"  said  the  bishop,  with  a  smile,  "you  are 
a  good  Catholic ;  only  you  do  not  know  it." 

Small  wonder  that  when  he  left  Santiago  in 
the  spring  of  1899  to  visit  the  United  States  Wood 
was  presented  by  the  people  of  the  city  with  a 
magnificent  hand-work  scroll  which  said  in  Span 
ish: 

125 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

"The  people  of  the  City  of  Santiago  de  Cuba 
to  General  Leonard  Wood  .  .  .  the  greatest  of 
all  your  successes  is  to  have  won  the  confidence 
and  esteem  of  a  people  in  trouble." 

Small  wonder  that  in  December,  1899,  less  than 
a  year  after  the  United  States  took  over  the  island, 
he  was  appointed  by  President  McKinley  Gover 
nor  General  of  Cuba  and  made  a  Major  General 
of  United  States  Volunteers ! 


THE  ADMINISTRATOR 


VI 

THE  ADMINISTRATOR 

IT  has  been  said  that  General  Wood's  work  in 
Havana  as  Governor-General  of  Cuba  was  the 
continuation  of  his  work  at  Santiago  on  a  larger 
s-cale.  This  would  seem  to  be  erroneous. 

The  Santiago  problem  was  the  cleaning  and 
reorganizing  of  a  city  of  50,000  inhabitants. 
Many  stringent  measures  could  properly  be  put 
into  operation  in  such  a  community  which  were 
quite  impossible  in  a  city  of  #50,000  inhabitants 
like  Havana,  or  in  a  state  of  two  and  one-half 
million  people  such  as  the  Island  of  Cuba.  It  was 
possible  in  an  epidemic  to  close  up  houses  tempo 
rarily,  stop  business  and  commercial  intercourse 
for  a  period  where  only  50,000  people  were  con 
cerned.  But  to  stop  the  daily  commerce  of  a 
large  city,  the  capital  of  a  state,  was  out  of  the 
question. 

Furthermore  the  problem  in  the  first  instance 
was  one  of  organizing  a  community  in  so  deplor- 
129 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

able  a  condition  that  it  was  on  the  verge  of  an 
archy.  In  the  second  instance  much  of  the  clean- 
ing-up  process  had  been  at  least  begun  by  other 
American  officers.  It  was  here  in  Havana  a  case 
of  administration  and  statecraft  as  against  or 
ganization. 

It  was  the  taking  of  a  crown  colony  of  Spain 
— a  kingdom — which  had  never  been  anything  but 
a  royal  colony,  and  turning  it  in  two  years  and  a 
half  into  a  republic,  self-governed,  self-judged, 
self-administered  and  self-supporting. 

Roughly  speaking,  there  had  never  been  such  a 
case.  Even  now  the  proposal  of  the  Philippine 
Islands  would  practically  be  the  second  case 
should  independence  be  granted  to  them  by  the 
United  States.  In  all  history  a  colony,  once  a 
colony,  either  has  remained  so,  or  has  revolted 
from  the  mother  country  and  by  force  of  arms 
established  its  own  independence. 

These  two  problems,  then,  were  quite  differ 
ent  in  their  essential  elements  and  they  required 
'lifferent  qualities  in  the  man  who  settled  them. 

President  McKinley's  instructions  to  the  new 
Governor-General  were  "To  prepare  Cuba,  as  rap- 
130 


The  Administrator 


idly  as  possible,  for  the  establishment  of  an  in 
dependent  government,  republican  in  form,  and  a 
good  school  system."  And  both  the  President 
and  the  Secretary  of  War  left  their  representa 
tive  entirely  to  his  own  resources  to  work  this  out. 
His  work  was  laid  out  for  him  and  he  was  given 
a  free  hand. 

General  Wood,  therefore,  in  December,  1899, 
after  having  been  received  with  a  magnificent  ova 
tion  on  his  return  to  the  United  States,  made  a 
Major-General  and  given  an  LL.D.  degree  by  his 
own  University  of  Harvard — after  having  re 
turned  to  Santiago  suddenly  upon  the  outbreak 
of  yellow  fever,  cleaned  the  town,  covered  it  with 
chloride  of  lime,  soaked  it  with  corrosive  subli 
mate,  burned  out  its  sewers  and  cesspools,  and 
checked  the  epidemic, — finally  took  up  his  resi 
dence  in  Havana  and  began  his  work. 

One  can  readily  imagine  the  immediate  prob 
lems  all  of  which  needed  settlement  at  once,  none 
of  which  could  be  settled  without  study  of  the 
most  thorough  and  vital  sort.  Wood's  method 
was  that  of  an  administrator  and  statesman  of 
great  vision.  He  immediately  proceeded  to  se- 
131 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

cure  wherever  he  could  find  them  the  best  men 
on  each  of  the  problems  and  set  them  to  work 
with  such  assistance,  expert  and  otherwise,  as 
they  required  to  make  reports  to  him  within  a 
limited  time  as  to  what  should  be  done  in  their 
particular  branches  of  the  government. 

Again,  it  was  so  simple  that  it  can  be  told  in 
words  of  one  syllable.  But  the  great  adminis 
trator  appeared  in  the  selection  of  the  men  for 
the  jobs  and  in  the  final  acceptance,  rejection, 
or  medication  of  the  plans  proposed.  While  he 
was  an  absolute  monarch  of  the  Island  he  never 
exerted  that  authority  unless  there  was  no  other 
possible  course.  In  all  cases  he  left  decisions  in 
so  far  as  that  could  be  done  to  native  bodies  and 
native  representatives  and  native  courts  with  full 
authority. 

Chief  Justice  White  of  the  Supreme  Court  upon 
being  consulted  told  him  that  in  the  main  the  laws 
were  sound  but  that  the  procedure  was  faulty; 
that  he  must  look  closely  to  this  and  make  many 
modifications.  This  hint  from  a  great  authority 
became  his  guide. 

The  most  crying  needs  of  the  moment  were  the 


The  Administrator 


courts  and  the  prisons.  Prisoners  were  held 
without  cause;  trials  were  a  farce;  the  prisons 
themselves  were  filthy  places  where  all  ages  were 
herded  together;  court  houses  were  out  of  repair 
and  out  of  use;  records  hardly  existed,  and  the 
whole  machinery  of  justice  was  that  of  a  decayed 
colony  of  a  decayed  kingdom  totally  without  the 
respect  of  the  public  and  without  self-respect. 

General  Wood  began  with  characteristic 
promptness  to  get  to  the  root  of  the  matter.  The 
principal  officer  charged  with  the  prosecution  of 
cases  was  removed  and  a  mixed  commission,  se 
lected  and  appointed  by  himself,  substituted.  As 
a  result  in  a  short  time  six  hundred  prisoners  were 
freed,  because  there  was  not  sufficient  evidence 
against  them  to  warrant  their  arrests.  Court 
houses  were  put  into  repair.  Judges  with  fixed 
and  sufficient  salaries  were  appointed ;  officials 
were  set  at  work  upon  salaries  that  were  fair  and 
— what  is  far  more  to  the  point — were  regularly 
paid.  Prison  commissions  appointed  by  Wood 
examined  conditions  and  the  prisons  were  cleaned, 
moved  to  other  buildings,  or  renovated  and  re 
modelled  according  to  modern  American  methods. 
133 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

The  result  in  less  than  six  months  was  that  na 
tive  officials  were  conducting  this  work  in  a  self- 
respecting,  honorable  manner,  convicting  or  re 
leasing  prisoners  in  short  order  and  bringing  the 
idea  of  justice  into  respect  in  the  public  mind. 
The  establishment  of  order  was  a  natural  result. 
Outbreaks  and  riots  became  unknown.  The  peo 
ple  began  to  realize  as  no  amount  of  exhibition 
of  power  on  the  part  of  the  invaders  could  ever 
have  made  them  realize  that  peace,  order,  fair 
play,  and  a  chance  to  live  had  come  upon  the  land 
in  what  seemed  some  miraculous  fashion. 

The  respect  of  the  individual  for  the  State  was 
born  again  in  the  Cuban  mind — born,  perhaps  it 
is  fairer  to  say,  for  the  first  time  in  the  heart 
of  this  much  abused  and  ignorant  people.  Once 
this  really  pierced  their  inner  consciousness — the 
inner  consciousness  of  the  whole  people,  of  every 
body  poor  or  rich — these  people  felt  safe  and  se 
cure  and  knew  they  could  take  up  their  enter 
prises  with  safety  and  with  hope  of  adequate  re 
turns  which  should  belong  to  themselves. 

It  was  so  sound  to  do  this  wherever  possible 
through  the  medium  of  the  Cubans  themselves  and 
134 


The  Administrator 


not  through  army  officials !  It  was  so  sane  and 
clear-visioned  a  method  to  begin  with  this  great 
beam  of  the  remodeled  Cuban  house — this  build 
ing  up  by  the  process  of  individual  observation 
of  confidence  in  those  who  ruled  them! — and  the 
men  whom  General  Wood  selected  to  draw  the 
plans  were  experts  in  just  such  work.  He  se 
lected  them.  He  passed  on  their  schemes.  They 
did  the  work.  And  to  this  day  he  gives  them 
credit  for  the  whole  thing. 

Next  came  the  necessity  for  inculcating  the 
idea  of  government  of  the  people  by  the  people. 
Six  months  after  taking  office  General  Wood  had 
appointed  a  commission  on  a  general  election  law, 
had  adopted  a  plan  much  after  our  own  electoral 
laws  with  the  Australian  ballot  system  and  a  lim 
ited  suffrage,  had  prepared  in  his  own  office  in 
Havana  all  the  ballots,  ballot  boxes,  circulars  de 
scribing  election  rules  and  had  successfully  held 
throughout  Cuba  the  first  real  election  ever  known 
on  the  island — ever  known  to  the  people.  Muni 
cipal  officials  and  local  representatives  were 
chosen  everywhere  by  the  people  themselves  for 
the  first  time  in  their  lives. 
135 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Whether  such  a  thing  would  be  successful  and 
prove  effective  the  Governor-General  did  not 
know.  But  he  knew  that  it  was  the  right  thing 
to  do  if  they  were  ever  to  govern  themselves;  he 
trusted  them — and  he  took  the  risk. 

Next — or  rather  at  the  same  time  with  these 
two  basic  lines  of  constructive  building — came  the 
school  system.  When  the  United  States  took  over 
the  Island  the  school  system  was  non-existent. 
There  was  not  one  single  schoolhouse  belonging 
to  the  State  anywhere  on  the  Island.  There 
were  no  schools  at  all  except  private  and  church 
schools  and  very  few  of  them.  Children  in  the 
mass  did  not  attend  school.  There  was  no  foun 
dation  to  build  on.  The  whole  school  system  had 
to  be  created  new  from  the  bottom  to  the  top. 
That  schools  were  another  of  the  main  beams  of 
this  new  house  is  self-evident.  Yet  the  action 
taken  was  much  more  far-seeing  than  would  have 
been  possible  without  a  single  autocrat  to  decree, 
and  without  a  man  who  could  see  many  years 
ahead. 

"I  knew,"  said  the  Governor-General  in  one  of 
his  reports,  "that  we  were  going  to  establish  a 
136 


The  Administrator 


government  of  and  by  the  people  in  Cuba  and 
that  it  was  going  to  be  transferred  to  them  at  the 
earliest  possible  moment;  and  I  believed  that  the 
success  of  the  future  government  would  depend 
as  much  upon  the  foundation  and  extension  of  its 
public  schools  as  upon  any  other  factor,  that  such 
a  system  must  be  entirely  in  the  hands  of  the  peo 
ple  of  the  island." 

This  was  the  situation  when  in  the  beginning 
of  1900  within  a  month  after  taking  office  Wood 
selected  a  young  West  Pointer  who  had  been  a 
teacher  to  draw  up  a  school  system  and  school 
laws.  The  result  was  an  adaptation  of  the  Ohio 
and  Massachusetts  School  Systems ;  and  when  in 
1902  the  Island  was  turned  over  to  the  Cubans 
three  thousand  eight  hundred  schools  were  in  op 
eration  in  good  schoolhouses,  with  native  teach 
ers  well  paid,  with  256,000  pupils,  and  at  an  ex 
penditure  of  $4,000,000  a  year  out  of  a  total  an 
nual  state  revenue  of  $17,000,000.  In  other 
words  nearly  one-quarter  of  the  Island's  revenue 
had  been  spent  on  the  education  of  children  to 
make  them  good  and  self-respecting  citizens  where 
nothing  whatever  had  been  spent  before. 
187 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

It  was  a  very  bold  step.  No  other  country  on 
earth  had  ever  spent  so  large  a  portion  of  its  reve 
nue  on  education.  The  appropriations  in  the 
United  States  to-day  are  pitiful  in  comparison — 
and  yet  our  country  is  supposed  to  be  doing 
pretty  well  by  its  future  citizens.  Again  the  step 
taken  by  the  Governor-General  was  a  piece  of 
construction  of  the  main  essentials — of  the  things 
that  make  no  show,  but  build,  always  build. 

American  teachers  were  not  employed,  in  or 
der  that  the  Cubans  filled  with  suspicion  of  what 
the  invaders  were  going  to  do  might  not  be  led 
to  believe  that  there  was  any  attempt  being  made 
to  "Americanize"  the  Island.  But  on  the  other 
hand  in  the  summer  of  1900  one  thousand  of  these 
new  Cuban  teachers  were  invited  with  all  their 
expenses  paid  to  spend  several  months  at  Har 
vard  University  in  Cambridge  and  learn  some 
thing  of  American  pedagogy.  The  preparations 
for  transporting  this  large  number  and  handling 
them  during  their  stay  in  the  United  States  in 
volved  a  large  amount  of  work,  but  the  trip  was 
carried  through  without  mishap  or  accident  of 
any  kind,  and  the  thousand  teachers  returned  to 
138 


The  Administrator 


their  homes  in  the  Island  not  only  with  the  great 
benefit  resulting  from  this  instruction,  but  with 
the  immense  stimulus  of  a  visit  to  an  organized 
and  comparatively  smoothly  running  civilization. 
What  they  saw  was  of  even  greater  benefit  to  them 
in  the  long  run  than  what  they  learned  in  their 
summer  courses.  / 

At  this  time  the  city  of  Havana  was  a  fever- 
ridden,  dangerous  city.  Yellow  fever  and  other 
tropical  diseases  existed  always  and  blazed  up  into 
epidemics  at  certain  seasons  of  the  year.  Such 
systems  of  drainage  as  existed  emptied  into  the 
harbor  or  into  the  street  gutters.  A  beginning 
had  been  made  to  cleanse  the  city  before  Wood 
took  charge,  but  little  had  been  done  in  the  smaller 
cities  of  the  Island,  all  of  which  were  in  some 
what  the  same  condition  as  Santiago  in  1898  ex 
cept  for  the  added  scourge  in  the  latter  city  re 
sulting  from  its  siege. 

Nevertheless  different  methods  had  to  be  used 
in  Havana.  It  is  impossible  here  to  go  into  the 
mass  of  detail  in  the  appointing  of  commissions 
to  carry  out  the  different  sanitary  works  that 
were  required  in  Havana  and  all  over  the  Island 
139 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

in  cities,  towns  and  country  districts.  But,  fa 
miliar  as  it  now  is,  there  will  never  be  an  account 
of  this  work  which  has  made  Cuba  one  of  the 
healthiest  places  to  live  in  either  in  or  out  of  the 
tropics — there  will  never  be  a  description  so  short 
that  it  cannot  tell  of  the  work  of  the  unselfish,  al 
truistic  group  of  physicians  who  solved  the  yellow 
fever  problem  for  all  time.  It  gives  him  who 
writes  even  now  something  of  a  thrill  to  tell  a  lit 
tle  of  it  again  and  to  pay  tribute  to  the  man  who 
organized  the  work  and  to  the  men  who  carried 
it  out  under  his  unfailing  support  and  encourage 
ment.  It  is  the  greatest  achievement  of  medicine 
since  the  discovery  of  the  smallpox  vaccine.  It 
is  one  of  the  bright  spots  in  the  history  of  man 
kind. 

Here  it  is  told  best  by  the  organizer  of  it  in  his 
official  language  with  all  the  reserve  and  reticence 
that  go  with  all  the  writing  he  has  ever  issued. 
Between  the  lines  one  reads  the  story  of  a  hgmarod 
cases  of  bravery  as  great  as  that  required  by  any 
fighter  in  the  world,  a  hundred  instances  of  self- 
sacrifice  and  risk  willingly  given  in  those  fever- 
stricken  places  and  quarantined  hospitals,  freely 
140 


The  Administrator 


offered  that  those  who  came  after  might  be  saved 
from  the  black  cloud  which  then  hung  over  all 
tropical  and  semi-tropical  countries. 

In  the  Spring  and  summer  of  1900  a  yellow 
fever  epidemic  broke  out  in  Havana  and  in  many 
parts  of  the  Island.  All  the  sanitary  methods 
known  to  man  seemed  to  have  no  effect  upon  it. 
Nothing  seemed  to  do  much  good. 

At  this  point  General  Wood,  knowing  of  the 
theory  of  Dr.  Fin/lay  that  yellow  fever  was  trans 
mitted  by  the  bite  of  a  mosquito  and  at  his  wits' 
end  to  know  what  step  to  take  next,  received  no 
tice  _that  a  commission  consisting  of  Drs.  Reed, 

$A\*»4'*:b~ 
Carroll^and  La^jSgr  had  been  appointed  to  make 

a  thorough  study  of  the  disease  at  first  hand  and 

report   to,  him.     "After   several   preliminary   in- 

Jr&J-.  -eAr 

restigationsADr.  Laz&ejr  submitted  himself  as   a 
/\ 

subject  for  an  experiment  for  the  purpose  of 
demonstrating  that  the  yellow  fever  could  be  trans 
mitted  in  this  way.  He  was  inoculated  with  an 
infected  mosquito,  took  the  fever  and  died.  Dr. 
Carroll ywas  »W  bitren^md  had  a  serious  case  of 
yellow  fever,  but  fortunately  recovered. 

"The  foregoing  was  the  situation  when  Doctors 
141 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

.  /  Reed,  Carroll  and  Kean  called  at  headquarters 
and  stated  that  they  believed  the  point  had  been 
reached  where  it  was  necessary  to  make  a  number 
of  experiments  on  human  beings  and  that  they 
wanted  money  to  pay  those  who  were  willing  to 
submit  themselves  to  these  experiments  and  they 
needed  authority  to  make  experiments.  They 
were  informed  that  whatever  money  was  required 
would  be  made  available,  and  that  the  military 
Governor  would  assume  the  responsibility  for  the 
experiments.  They  were  cautioned  to  make  these 
experiments  only  on  sound  persons,  and  not  until 
they  had  been  made  to  distinctly  understand  the 
purpose  of  the  same  and  especially  the  risk  they 
assumed  in  submitting  themselves  as  subjects  for 
these  experiments,  and  to  always  secure  the  writ 
ten  consent  of  the  subjects  who  offered  themselves 
for  this  purpose.  It  was  further  stipulated  that 
all  subjects  should  be  of  full  legal  age.  With  this 
understanding,  the  work  was  undertaken  in  a  care 
ful  and  systematic  manner.  A  large  number^of 
experiments  were  made. 

"The  Stegomyia  mosquito  was  found  to  be  be 
yond  question  the  means  of  transmitting  the  yel- 


The  Administrator 


low  fever  germ.  This  mosquito,  in  order  to  be 
come  infected,  must  bite  a  person  sick  with  the 

yellow  fever  during  the  first  4w«-  days  of  the  dis- 

L     lj4 
ease.     It  then   requires   approximately  ton 

for  the  germs  so  to  develop  that  the  mosquito  can 
transmit  the  disease,  and  all  non-immunes  who  are 
bitten  by  a  mosquito  of  the  class  mentioned,  in 
fected  as  described,  invariably  develop  a  pro 


nounced  case  .of  yellow  fever  in  from  three-; 

LK 

nnr  half  to  ft**  days  from  the  time  they  are  bit 
ten.  It  was  further  demonstrated  that  infection 
from  cases  so  produced  could  be  again  transmit 
ted  by  the  above  described  type  of  mosquito  to 
another  person  who  would,  in  turn,  become  in 
fected  with  the  fever.  It  was  also  proved  that 
yellow  fever  could  be  transmitted  by  means  of 
introduction  into  the  circulation  of  blood  serum 
even  after  filtering  through  porcelain  filters,  which 
latter  experiment  indicates  that  the  organism  is 
exceedingly  small,  so  small,  in  fact,  that  it  is  prob 
ably  beyond  the  power  of  any  microscope  at  pres 
ent  in  use.  It  was  positively  demonstrated  that 
yellow  fever  could  not  be  transmitted  by  clothing, 
letters,  etc.,  and  that,  consequently  all  the  old 
143 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

methods  of  fumigation  and  disinfection  were  only 
useful  so  far  as  they  served  to  destroy  mosqui 
toes,  their  young  and  their  eggs."  * 

That  is  the  story  of  a  work  that  has  made  Cuba 
a  healthy  land,  that  has  freed  the  southern  part 
of  the  United  States  forever  from  the  dread  dis 
ease,  that  has  made  the  building  of  the  Panama 
Canal  a  possibility  and  the  Canal  Zone  healthier 
in  death  rate  per  thousand  than  New  York  City, 
that  has  finaU^Trid  the  earth  of  yellow  fever  as 
vaccine  rid  it  of  smallpox  and  typhoid,  and  as 
the  discoveries  during  the  Great  War  have  made 
it  possible  to  check  tetanus  and  typhus  and  bu 
bonic  plague. 

It  was  done — the  work  was  done — by  the  doc 
tors  named  and  their  assistants  and  the  many  men 
who  took  up  the  burden  in  other  places  and  car 
ried  on.  All  honor  to  them!  But  the  man  who 
approved  the  idea,  who  took  the  risk  and  the  re 
sponsibility  and  backed  up  those  who  worked — 
the  man  who  kept  in  touch  with  it  day  by  day  and 

*  General  Wood's  Report  on  the  military  government  of 
Cuba. 

144 


The  Administrator 


saw  that  it  was  carried  through — was  Leonard 
Wood. 

Simultaneously  with  these  basic  administrative 
activities  many  other  lines  of  constructive  state 
building  were  inaugurated,  under  the  same  admin 
istrative  plan — the  plan  of  the  appointment  of  a 
specialist  or  a  commission  of  specialists  to  draw 
up  plans  and  report  to  the  Governor-General  who 
then  decided  and  started  the  actual  work  of  re 
organization. 

A  railroad  law  was  written,  and  General  Wood 
persuaded  General  Grenville  M.  Dodge  and  Sir 
William  Van  Horn  to  help  him  to  build  much  of 
the  present  railway  system  of  Cuba.  Hard  mod 
ern  roads  took  the  place  of  the  muddy  routes  al 
most  impassable  at  certain  seasons  of  the  year 
which  had  been  the  only  means  of  communication 
throughout  the  island.  Hospitals  and  charities 
were  grouped  under  a  new  organization  consist 
ing  almost  entirely  of  Cubans  which  renovated  old 
hospitals,  built  new  ones,  put  children  first  into 
temporary  homes  and  then  did  away  practically 
with  asylums  as  soon  as  the  destitute  children 
could  be  put  out  among  the  Cuban  families  who 
145 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

took  them  under  a  newly  made  law.  Thus,  in  so 
far  as  was  possible,  no  child  from  that  time  for 
ward  grew  up  with  the  stigma  of  an  orphan 
asylum  resting  upon  him  or  her,  but  had  the 
chance  offered  to  become  in  time  a  self-respecting 
inhabitant  of  a  self-respecting  community. 

Immense  sums  were  ^disbursed  by  the  military 
government  in  public  works,  harbor  improve 
ments,  lighthouses  which  had  almost  ceased  to 
exist,  post  offices  and  postal  systems,  telephone 
and  telegraph  connections,  offices  and  organiza 
tions  and  an  entirely  new  system  of  custom  houses 
and  quarantine  administrations. 

The  account  of  these  in  detail  is  the  same  story 
over  and  over  again — the  building  of  a  state  from 
bottom  to  top ;  and  the  administration  of  this 
state  by  those  people  who  throughout  their  entire 
lives  had  known  nothing  of  the  sort — much  less 
had  any  voice  in  its  management. 

Two  require  special  notice  because  of  the  tact 
and  judgment  required  in  handling  them  and  be 
cause  of  the  vital  importance  their  consummation 
meant  in  the  final  settlement  of  Cuban  difficulties. 

One  was  the  ending  of  the  long  standing  war 
146 


The  Administrator 


between  the  Spanish  Government  and  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  upon  the  question  of  church  prop 
erty  appropriated  by  Spain.  No  settlement  had 
been  made  since  the  concordat  of  1861.  And 
when  General  Wood  took  command  of  the  Island 
the  Church  came  to  him  and  said:  "What  is  the 
United  States  going  to  do?  Is  it  war,  or  peace? 
Give  us  our  property  back,  or  pay  us  for  the  use 
of  it." 

With  infinite  wisdom  and  tact  the  Governor- 
General  appointed  judicial  commissions  to  make 
an  exhaustive  study  of  the  situation  which  resulted 
in  reports  showing  that  the  claims  of  the  Church 
were  in  the  main  just  and  fair,  and  a  settlement 
was  reached  by  which  the  State  purchased  most 
of  the  property,  and  rented  for  five  years  the  rest, 
so  that  time  should  be  given  for  equitable  ad 
justment.  This  settled  for  all  time  a  century-old 
trouble  which  alone  would  have  made  the  setting 
up  of  a  peaceable  and  effective  government  doubt 
ful. 

The  other  sound  reorganization  of  a  delicate  na 
ture  was  the  action  of  the  Governor-General  in 
revising  a  law  which  made  marriages  only  legal  if 
147 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

performed  by  a  judge  and  ignoring  the  church 
ceremony  altogether.  The  changed  law  recog 
nized  either  church  or  civil  marriage  and  quieted 
the  most  serious  of  all  family  troubles  in  the  Is 
land. 

Finally  a  constitutional  convention  was  planned 
and  held,  at  which  a  constitution  of  the  republi 
can  form  based  upon  that  of  the  United  States 
was  framed  and  adopted ;  an  electoral  law  for  elec 
tions  in  the  Cuban  republic  was  also  adopted;  and 
the  general  administrative  law  of  the  land  was  re 
written  and  adapted  so  that  the  government  of 
the^Island  could  be  turned  over  to  its  inhabitants 
in  workable  form  even  though  that  form  was  new 
to  them  and  they  new  to  self-government  in  any 
form. 

Look  for  a  moment  at  the  result  of  this  work. 
In  December,  1899,  Leonard  Wood  took  command 
of  the  Island  of  Cuba.  In  May,  1902,  he  turned 
over  that  Island  to  its  own  inhabitants.  In  1899 
except  for  the  military  work  done  by  the  Ameri 
can  Army  the  Island  contained  Spaniards  who  had 
for  years  been  its  autocratic  rulers  and  who  had 
recently  been  defeated  in  a  war ;  and  Cubans  who 
148 


The  Administrator 


had  for  years  been  governed  by  a  tyrant  race. 
In  1902  these  two  century-old  hostile  groups, 
neither  of  whom  had  ever  had  any  real  experience 
in  modern  representative  government,  received 
their  country  at  the  hands  of  the  Americans  with 
new  laws,  with  a  republican  form  of  government, 
with  their  own  kind  for  rulers  elected  by  their 
own  people,  and  began  an  existence  that  has  now 
been  running  long  enough  to  prove  that  the  work 
was  so  well  performed  for  them  as  to  make  the 
impossible  possible — the  rotten  kingdom,  a  clean 
republic;  the  decayed  colony,  an  independent, 
proud  democracy. 

It  is  a  piece  of  work  unparalleled  in  the  annals 
of  history.  And  the  closing  episodes  which  oc 
curred  in  Havana  are  a  witness  to  the  affection 
and  pride  in  which  the  people  held  the  man  who 
had  accomplished  it,  the  nation  which  had  or 
dered  it  and  their  Island  which  was  the  scene  of 
its  happening. 

One  typical  episode  occurred  on  the  night  of 

President  Palma's  inauguration  ball  given  to  the 

new  President  and  the  new  Cuban  Congress  by 

General   Wood.     Wood   took    a    number    of   the 

149 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

principal  representatives  of  the  new  Cuban  Con 
gress  to  the  Spanish  Club — the  hotbed  of  the 
Spanish  regime — where  there  was  a  celebration  in 
progress  in  honor  of  King  Alfonso's  birthday. 
The  two  nationalities  fraternized  at  once  under 
the  influence  of  the  American  Governor-General, 
and  all  of  them,  Spaniards  and  Cubans,  drank  the 
health  of  the  King  of  Spain.  The  President  and 
the  principal  members  of  the  Club  then  joined 
the  party  and  went  to  the  ball  together,  where 
in  turn  all  of  them,  Spaniards  and  Cubans  alike, 
drank  the  health  of  the  new  republic.  When 
Wood's  family  left  for  Spain  the  Spanish  colony 
in  Havana  made  a  request  that  they  should  sail 
on  the  Spanish  Royal  Mail  Steamer  in  order  that 
they  might  show  their  appreciation  of  his  work. 
And  this  ship  when  she  sailed  was  the  first  Span 
ish  boat  to  salute  the  brand  new  Cuban  flag  which 
had  just  been  raised  at  the  entrance  to  the  har 
bor  where  for  400  years  before  that  day  the  flag 
of  Spain  had  waved. 

Another  witness  to  the  singular  skill  with  which 
the  Governor-General  handled  the  diplomatic  re 
lations  of  the  republic,  and  which  is  probably  un- 
150 


The  Administrator 


equaled  anywhere  in  history,  follows.  This  wit 
ness  has  to  do  with  his  work  in  laying  the  founda 
tions  of  peace  between  the  government  of  the  Is 
land  and  the  Catholic  Church.  It  is  only  possi 
ble  here  to  quote  from  a  few  of  the  documents 
which  Wood  received  not  only  as  acknowledgment 
of  his  wise  and  sane  policy,  but  as  voluntary  signs 
of  personal  affection  and  respect  which  the  writers 
held  for  him  when  his  difficult  task  was  done. 
Monsignor  Donatus,  Bishop  of  Havana,  wrote 
among  other  letters  three  which  deserve  quoting 
here.  They  were  all  voluntary  expressions  on  his 
part.  The  first,  dated  at  Havana  on  August  10, 
1900,  says  in  part: 

"To  His  Excellency,  Majo.'-General  Leonard 
Wood,  U.S.A.,  Military  Governor  of  Cuba.  Hon 
ored  Sir: 

"I  saw  published  in  the  official  Gazetta  yester 
day  the  decree  whereby  you  give  civil  effects  and 
validity  to  religious  marriages.  This  act  of  your 
Excellency  corresponds  perfectly  with  the  ele 
vated  ideals  of  justice,  fairness  and  true  liberty  to 
which  aspired  the  institutions  and  government  of 
151 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  United  States,  which  you  so  worthily  repre 
sent  in  this  Island. 

"I  gladly  take  this  opportunity  of  declaring 
that  in  all  my  dealings  with  your  Excellency  I 
have  found  you  ever  disposed  to  listen  to  all  rea 
sonable  petitions  and  to  guard  the  sacred  rights 
of  justice  which  is  the  firmest  foundation  of  every 
honored  and  noble  nation. 

"I  am  moved,  therefore,  to  speak  the  thanks  not 
only  of  the  Catholics  but  likewise  of  all  others  who 
truly  love  the  moral,  religious  and  political  well- 
being  of  the  people,  and  to  express  to  your  Ex 
cellency  the  sincere  feelings  and  satisfaction  and 
gratitude  for  this  decree,  which  is  worthy  of  a 
wise  leader  and  an  able  statesman.  This  too  gives 
me  confidence  that  all  your  decrees  and  orders  will 
continue  to  be  dictated  by  the  same  high-minded 
and  liberal  spirit  of  justice  that  while  it  respects 
the  religious  sentiment,  also  guarantees  and  de 
fends  the  rights  and  liberties  of  all  honest  insti 
tutions.  Very  respectfully  yours,  X.  Donatus, 
Bishop  of  Havana." 

The  second  from  the  same  place,  dated  Decem 
ber  11,  1900,  says: 


The  Administrator 


"All  lovers  of  liberty  of  conscience,  all  guardi 
ans  of  the  sanctity  of  the  home  and  all  who  under 
stand  and  admire  good  citizenship  must  recognize 
in  this  as  in  your  other  order  on  the  same  subject, 
the  wisdom  of  a  far-seeing  statesman  and  the 
courage  of  a  fearless  executive. 

"Thanking  you  therefore  in  my  own  name  and 
in  the  name  of  the  Church  I  represent,  I  remain 
with  every  sentiment  of  respect  and  esteem,  Very 
sincerely  yours,  X.  Donatus,  Bishop  of  Havana." 

And  finally  as  the  Bishop  was  leaving  Havana 
in  November,  1901,  to  become  the  Bishop  of 
Ephesus  and  proceed  to  Rome,  he  wrote: 

"Called  by  the  confidence  of  the  Holy  Father 
to  a  larger  and  more  difficult  field  of  action,  I  feel 
the  duty  before  leaving  Cuba  to  express  to  your 
Excellency  my  sentiment  of  friendship  and  grati 
tude,  not  only  for  the  kindness  shown  to  me,  but 
for  the  fair  treatment  of  the  questions  with  the 
Government  of  the  Island,  especially  the  Marriage 
and  Church  Property  questions.  The  equity  and 
justice  which  inspired  your  decisions  will  devolve 
before  all  fair-minded  people  to  the  honor,  not 
153 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

only  of  you  personally,  but  also  to  the  Govern 
ment  you  so  worthily  represent.  I  am  gratified  to 
tell  you  that  I  have  already  expressed  the  same 
sentiment  to  the  Holy  Father  in  writing  and  I 
will  tell  him  orally  on  my  visit  to  Rome.  Yours  very 
respectfully,  X.  Donatus,  Bishop  of  Havana." 

An  interesting  result  of  this  work  of  Wood's 
in  regard  to  the  settlement  of  the  religious  ques 
tions  of  the  Island  came  later  on  when  he  was 
starting  on  his  way  to  take  up  his  work  in  the 
Philippines  in  the  form  of  a  delegation  of  Church 
authorities  headed  by  Archbishop  Jones.  This 
delegation  came  to  General  Wood  to  say  that  its 
members  proposed  to  approach  the  President  of 
the  United  States  and  suggest  that  Wood  be 
given  the  same  authority  to  represent  church  mat 
ters  in  the  Philippines  as  he  had  had  in  Cuba. 
They  added  that  if  this  were  done,  they  would 
give  him  full  power  to  represent  the  Catholic 
Church  as  a  referee  and  confer  upon  him  the  power 
not  only  to  recommend  action  in  all  matters,  but 
to  settle  all  matters  for  the  Church  himself. 

It  is  very  doubtful  if  such  authority  has  many 
times  in  history  been  given  to  a  Protestant  by  the 
154 


The  Administrator 


Church  of  Rome,  and  it  marks  the  extraordinary 
height  to  which  Wood's  ability  had  lifted  him  in 
the  world  at  large. 

It  is  hardly  to  be  wondered  at  that  Theodore 
Roosevelt  wrote  at  the  time:  "Leonard  Wood 
four  years  ago  went  down  to  Cuba,  has  served 
there  ever  since,  has  rendered  services  to  that 
country  of  the  kind  which  if  performed  three  thou 
sand  years  ago  would  have  made  him  a  hero  mixed 
up  with  the  sun  god  in  various  ways ;  a  man  who 
devoted  his  whole  life  through  those  four  years, 
who  thought  of  nothing  else,  did  nothing  else,  save 
to  try  to  bring  up  the  standard  of  political  and 
social  life  in  that  Island,  to  teach  the  people  after 
four  centuries  of  misrule  that  there  were  such 
things  as  governmental  righteousness  and  honesty 
and  fair  play  for  all  men  on  their  merits  as  men."  * 

*  Harvard  Graduates'  Magazine. 


THE  STATESMAN 


VII 

THE  STATESMAN 

MEANTIME,  while  Wood  was  carrying  on  his 
work  in  Cuba,  events  of  importance  to  him  and  to 
his  country  were  taking  place  in  the  United 
States.  The  popularity  of  his  war  record  had 
made  Roosevelt  Governor  of  New  York,  and  when 
the  time  came  for  him  to  run  for  a  second  term  the 
Republican  organization  of  the  state  forced  him 
to  take  the  nomination  for  Vice-President  of  the 
United  States  in  order  to  keep  him  out  of  the 
gubernatorial  field.  He  objected  strongly  and 
tried  to  remain  in  the  state  fight,  but  at  the  con 
vention  in  Philadelphia  upon  a  certain  momentous 
occasion  Thomas  Platt,  then  head  of  the  state 
and  national  Republican  organization,  is  said  to 
have  remarked  to  him: 

"Mr.  Roosevelt,  if  you  do  not  desire  the  vice- 
presidential  nomination,  there  is  always  the  al 
ternative  of  retirement  to  private  life." 

In  other  words  party  machinery  was  too  strong 
159 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

for  him  and  much  against  his  will  he  was  forced 
to  run  as  second  on  the  McKinley-Roosevelt 
presidential  ticket. 

The  Republicans  were  successful  and  Roosevelt, 
knowing  that  there  was  little  for  him  to  do  in 
Washington,  was  planning  an  extended  trip 
through  the  Southern  states  to  make  an  exhaus 
tive  study  of  the  negro  question.  He  had  indeed 
begun  to  accumlate  material  on  this  subject  when 
on  September  6,  1901,  McKinley  was  shot  at  Buf 
falo.  A  few  days  later  he  died;  and  Theodore 
Roosevelt  became  President  of  the  United  States. 

For  Wood  this  meant  much  in  the  future — much 
of  good  and  something  of  trouble.  Roosevelt  was 
his  devoted  friend  and  supporter,  and  upon  his 
return  to  the  United  States  in  early  1902  he  found 
this  devoted  friend  the  head  of  the  nation,  himself 
a  Brigadier-General  of  the  regular  army  sched 
uled  to  go  into  regular  army  work  and  to  live  on 
an  army  officer's  pay.  In  this  country  there  is 
no  other  procedure  possible.  In  England  such  a 
man  would  have  been  given  a  title  and  a  large  sum 
of  money  to  make  it  possible  for  him  to  keep  up 
the  position  which  a  man  of  his  abilities  and  at- 
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The  Statesman 


tainments  should  keep  up.  Here  the  case  is  dif 
ferent. 

He  had  the  alternative  of  going  on,  or  retiring 
and  entering  commercial  pursuits.  Offers  looking 
towards  the  latter  contingency  were  not  wanting. 
He  was,  in  fact,  asked  to  take  a  business  position 
which  offered  him  forty  thousand  a  year.  Here 
was  a  large  income  for  a  man  of  forty-two,  regu 
lar  work  of  an  interesting  sort,  security  and  a 
clear  future  for  himself  and  his  family.  Instead, 
he  accepted  the  appointment  to  the  Philippines 
which  meant  and  indeed,  as  the  outcome  showed, 
actually  involved  more  than  a  hundred  military 
engagements  amongst  the  natives  of  the  islands  in 
many  of  which  he  risked  his  life. 

Here  again  he  took  the  road  of  service  to  his 
country  as  he  had  each  time  the  ways  divided 
since  the  day  when  as  a  young  doctor  he  entered 
the  army.  No  one  but  he  himself  can  tell  in  de 
tail  just  the  reasons  which  led  to  this  decision, 
but  in  the  main  they  were  the  instinctive  desire 
for  action,  for  execution  and  for  the  open  road, 
which  then  as  now  swayed  him  in  all  his  actions 
and  decisions.  Then,  too,  he  felt  that  since 
161 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Roosevelt  was  President,  criticisms  of  their  rela 
tions  in  political  circles  might  readily  arise,  as 
indeed  did  occur  later;  and  lest  their  friendship 
should  be  misunderstood  he  took  the  Philippine 
appointment — applied  for  it,  even — in  order  that 
being  thus  out  of  the  country,  cause  for  any  such 
occurrences  might  perhaps  be  avoided. 

It  is  always  interesting  to  look  back  through 
the  career  of  such  a  man  and  speculate  on  the 
chance  or  wise  decision  which  caused  the  choice  of 
the  right  road  or  the  left  road  at  such  a  time. 
Neither  Wood  nor  Roosevelt  could  possibly  know 
or  foresee  that  this  decision  would  furnish  the 
former  with  the  material  which  eventually  led  to 
his  doing  more  than  all  the  rest  of  the  United 
States  put  together  to  start  preparation  for  the 
Great  War.  Neither  of  them  could  have  guessed 
that  his  administration  in  the  Philippines  would 
bring  out  further  qualities  in  Wood  which  showed 
the  statesman  as  well  as  the  administrator  in  him. 

What  might  have  happened  otherwise  is  again 

a  futile  speculation — perhaps  something  to  bring 

him  still  more  before  the  people  of  his  country, 

perhaps  less — yet  it  may  be  safely  said,  judging 

162 


The  Statesman 


from  history  and  biography  the  world  over,  that 
it  is  probable  no  road  he  might  have  taken  would 
have  suppressed  Leonard  Wood's  executive  and 
administrative  qualities.  Indeed  the  fact  that  for 
practically  thirty  years  he  has  been  in  the  army, 
that  he  is  a  soldier  in  every  inch  of  his  big  body, 
has  never  even  to  this  day  made  him  a  militarist. 
He  is  and  always  has  been  an  administrator;  and 
that  quality  with  all  that  it  means  would  in  all 
likelihood  have  cropped  out  in  whatever  profes 
sion  he  might  have  chosen  or  been  forced  into  by 
circumstances. 

Men  of  ability  are  doubtless  occasionally  kept 
down ;  but  not  as  a  rule.  They  rise  to  the  occa 
sion.  And  conversely  men  of  small  minds,  dream 
ers  and  theorists  looking  to  the  settlement  of  all 
problems  on  the  instant  seldom  last  long  at  the 
top  although  they  rise  to  prominence  here  and 
there  in  times  of  excitement  and  hysteria  such  as 
we  are  passing  through  to-day.  It  is  only  the 
sound  common  sense  of  humanity  coupled  with 
great  ability  that  stands  the  test.  It  is  only  they 
who  keep  ever  before  them  the  fact  that  elemen- 
168 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

tal  laws  do  not  change,  cannot  be  changed,  who 
stand  the  test  and  strain  of  emergency. 

The  entire  world  since  the  Great  War  is  filled 
with  new  theories,  new  plans,  new  outlooks  for  all 
of  us.  We  cannot  go  back  to  the  old  status.  Yet 
because  we  cannot  go  back  there  would  seem  to 
be  no  reason  for  our  going  mad.  The  wall  paper 
has  changed — must  change.  New  decorations 
with  wonderful  and  to  American  ears  unpro 
nounceable  names  have  been  displayed  before  the 
eyes  of  Europe  and  America  by  the  advanced  ar 
chitects  of  the  day.  But  that  individual — not  to 
mention  nations — who  becomes  fascinated  with  the 
new  colors  and  designs  will  suffer  horribly  in  the 
end  if,  having  forgotten  to  look  to  the  beams  of 
his  house,  he  finds  it  shortly  tumbling  about  his 
ears.  Sane  vision,  clear  thinking  at  critical  times 
has  saved  and  will  save  many  times  again  those 
who  would  fall  but  for  such  guidance. 

To-day  in  this  land  such  men  are  needed.    They 

must  come  forward,  not  in  haste  or  with  sudden 

panaceas,  but  with  the  same  old  sound  common 

sense  which  has  made  vis  what  we  are  and  will  keep 

164 


The  Statesman 


us  from  becoming  what  parts  of  the  rest  of  the 
world  have  already  become. 

In  1902  the  situation,  while  not  as  acute  as  to 
day,  had  nevertheless  its  problems  to  be  solved; 
and  though  we  had  just  finished  what  in  the  light 
of  history  was  a  short  and  almost  insignificant 
war  the  country  was  startled  from  end  to  end  by 
the  discovery  of  its  unpreparedness.  As  has  al 
ready  been  said  our  amazing  lack  of  men  and 
equipment  for  any  such  occasion  had  been  im 
pressed  upon  Wood's  mind  by  personal  experience 
and  by  his  own  native  instinct  for  the  reverse. 

It  was  of  great  interest  to  him,  therefore,  to 
receive  shortly  the  appointment  to  visit  Germany 
as  an  American  military  observer  of  the  German 
Army,  maneuvers.  And  out  of  this  trip  he  learned 
more  thoroughly  the  lack  of  foresight  in  military 
matters  in  this  country  and  saw  more  clearly  the 
position  which  we  should  be  in,  if  such  a  machine 
as  the  German  Army  were  pitted  against  us  in 
stead  of  the  weak  and  decayed  forces  of  Spain. 

In  the  course  of  these  maneuvers  he  met  many 
of  the  greatest  military  men  of  Europe.  He  was 
received  and  entertained  by  the  German  Emperor 
165 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

not  only  because  of  his  position  in  the  American 
army  and  as  the  representative  of  the  United 
States,  but  as  the  man  who  in  Cuba  had  treated 
with  such  kindness  and  courtesy  German  officers 
of  a  visiting  training  ship  who  were  ill  with  the 
Island  fevers.  He  witnessed  the  grand  maneuvers 
of  the  greatest  army  the  world  has  ever  known. 
But,  what  in  his  own  belief  was  of  far  more  im 
portance,  he  met  and  talked  with  European  mili 
tary  experts  of  world-wide  reputation. 

Among  these  men  the  most  congenial  spirit  was 
Lord  Roberts.  The  little  man  of  Kandahar,  the 
great  fighter  of  Britain's  battles,  the  idol  of  the 
British  public,  was  then  striving  to  awaken  the 
English  people  and  the  English  government  to 
their  own  unp  rep  a  redness.  He  sought  even  then 
to  show  them  what  an  attack  by  a  force  like  the 
German  Army  would  mean  to  the  British  Empire. 
For  years  he  kept  at  it,  lecturing,  speaking,  cry 
ing  aloud  throughout  England  up  to  the  very  day 
when  without  warning  in  1914  his  countrymen 
found  themselves  with  a  scant  two  hundred  thou 
sand  soldiers  confronted  by  five  millions  of  trained 
Germans. 

166 


The  Statesman 


The  great  fighter,  the  great  preacher,  his  little 
body  filled  with  patriotism  and  a  great  heart,  un 
bosomed  to  Wood  and  met  a  responsive  assent  in 
Wood's  own  nature.  They  discussed  from  all 
sides  the  right  thing  to  do.  They  went  over  all 
the  European  systems  together  with  the  desire 
in  their  hearts  to  find  something  which  should  at 
the  same  time  give  a  nation  a  force  of  great  size 
that  could  be  quickly  put  into  action  and  still  not 
turn  that  nation  into  a  huge  military  machine. 
Neither  of  them  was  a  militarist.  Both  felt  that 
peace  was  best  preserved  by  the  power  to  pre 
serve  it. 

Together  they  seem  to  have  arrived  at  some 
adaptation  of  the  Swiss  system  which  provides 
that  small  country  with  a  relatively  enormous 
military  force  without  causing  the  citizens  to  give 
up  their  commercial  pursuits.  At  that  time  it 
is  probable  that  Wood  began  to  formulate  the  idea 
of  universal  military  training  of  all  male  citizens  * 
between  the  ages  of  eighteen  and  twenty-one  while 
they  were  finishing  school  and  college  and  before 
they  had  settled  upon  their  life  work. 

At  all  events   the  material  upon   the   subject 
167 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

which  he  managed  to  accumulate  in  the  way  of 
books,  pamphlets,  records  and  so  on  constitutes 
now  one  of  the  main  portions  of  his  extensive  li 
brary.  And  the  whole  trip  was  an  example  in 
his  case  of  what  a  man  can  do  incidentally — or 
apparently  incidentally — while  occupied  osten 
sibly  with  some  other  work.  During  his  stay  in 
Europe  he  met  many  statesmen  in  Germany, 
France  and  England  and  absorbed  from  them  all 
he  could  on  the  subject  that  was  fast  becoming 
his  greatest  interest. 

Upon  his  return  to  the  United  States  the  dif 
ficulties  which  Taft,  the  Governor  of  the  Philip 
pine  Islands,  was  having  in  trying  to  bring  order 
amongst  the  Moro,  or  Moslem,  Islands  and  the 
half  savage  tribes  which  inhabited  them  led 
President  Roosevelt  to  consider  the  advisability 
of  sending  some  one  to  undertake  this  difficult  and 
dangerous  task.  Speaking  of  it  to  Wood  one 
day  the  latter  said: 

"Why  not  send  me?" 

Roosevelt  immediately  referred  him  to  Mr.  Root, 
then  Secretary  of  War,  with  the  result  that  he 
was  appointed  Governor  of  Moro  Province  to  do 
168 


The  Statesman 


the  work  there  amongst  these  new  wards  of  the 
United  States  under  different  conditions  which  he 
had  already  done  in  Cuba. 

Wood  felt  very  strongly  that  it  would  be  far 
better  for  him  to  be  there  during  the  administra 
tion  of  Roosevelt  in  order  that  their  personal  re 
lationship  might  not  be  misunderstood.  This  was 
the  more  forcibly  brought  in  upon  his  conscious 
ness  by  the  occurrence  at  that  time  of  what  is 
known  as  the  Rathbone  affair, 
x  Major  Estes  G.  Rathbone,  formerly  an  assist 
ant  postmaster-general  and  at  this  time  detailed 
to  duties  in  the  newly  organized  Post  Office  in 
Cuba,  had  been  charged  with  wastefulness  of  pub 
lic  moneys  and  unwarranted  expenditure  of  pub 
lic  funds  for  personal  expenses.  He,  with  certain 
associates,  was  brought  to  trial  and  convicted. 
He  was  sentenced  to  a  long  term  of  imprisonment. 
It  was  one  of  the  few  cases  of  malfeasance  in  of 
fice  which  occurred  in  Cuba  during  Wood's  admin 
istration  and  was  dealt  with  by  the  regular  courts 
in  the  regular  manner. 

Nothing  further  would  have  come  of  it  in  all 
probability  had  not  the  extraordinarily  close  re- 
169 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

lations  of  Wood  and  Roosevelt  furnished  an  ex 
cuse.  The  fact  that  Roosevelt  was  President  of 
the  United  States  and  that  as  such  he  proposed 
the  name  of  Wood  for  advancement  to  Major-Gen 
eral  of  Regulars  from  Brigadier-General  added 
fuel  to  the  flames.  The  fact  that  Wood  was  the 
senior  Brigadier  and  that  as  such  he  would  nat 
urally  become  Maj  or-General  in  regular  seniority 
seems  to  have  carried  no  weight  at  the  time.  Even 
then  the  Rathbone  affair  would  have  had  no  con 
nection  with  the  matter  of  this  appointment  had 
not  Major  Rathbone  possessed  personal  friends 
high  politically  in  the  government  of  the  time,  and 
had  not  the  regular  army  officers  looked  with  dis 
favor  upon  the  appointment  even  in  regular  order 
of  a  man  who  had  been  an  army  surgeon  and  who 
was  not  what  is  known  as  a  line  officer  originally. 

All  these  influences,  however,  coming  together 
at  the  same  time  caused  an  uproar  in  Congress 
over  his  appointment  which,  while  it  cleared  Wood 
entirely,  still  made  a  political  scandal  that  hurt 
to  the  quick  the  man  who  had  just  accomplished 
what  he  had  accomplished  in  Cuba. 

Wood  was  charged  with  conduct  unbecoming 
170 


The  Statesman 


an  officer;  that  he  made  an  intimate  friend  of  an 
ex-convict  in  Santiago,  and  employed  him  as  a 
newspaper  correspondent  to  blacken  the  charac 
ter  of  eminent  American  officers  and  advertise  him 
self;  that  Rathbone  was  unjustly  accused  and 
convicted  through  Wood's  direct  agency;  that 
Wood  had  been  guilty  of  extravagance;  that  he 
had  accepted  while  Governor-General  presents 
from  a  gambling  house  in  Havana,  and  so  on. 

All  this  evidence  and  much  more  was  laid  before 
the  Committee  of  the  Senate  on  Military  Affairs 
and  was  most  thoroughly  aired.  The  result  was  the 
absolute  vindication  of  Wood,  his  confirmation  as 
Maj  or-General  of  the  Regular  Army  and  a  re 
port  which  is  a  part  of  the  records  of  the  Senate 
in  which  it  is  written  that :  .  .  .  "not  one  of  them 
has  a  better  claim,  by  reason  of  his  past  record 
and  experience  as  a  commander,  than  has  General 
Wood;  and  in  the  opinion  of  the  Committee  no 
one  has  in  view  of  his  present  rank  equal  claim  to 
his  on  the  ground  of  merit  measured  by  the  con 
siderations  suggested." 

The  whole  episode  thus  ended  in  still  greater 
credit  to  General  Wood.  It  is  only  interesting 
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The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

and  in  point  here  and  now  because  it  brings  out 
the  fact  that  the  man  himself  never  had  the  sup 
port  of  the  Washington  Army  Department  men 
until  his  service  in  the  Philippines,  except  here  and 
there  amongst  those  officers  who  have  served  under 
him.  Doubtless  his  extraordinary  executive  work 
in  getting  the  Rough  Riders  ready  for  action  and 
his  methods  which  over-rode  precedents  and  de 
stroyed  red  tape  throughout  the  whole  of  the  War 
Department  of  that  day  had  much  to  do  with 
this.  That  there  should  follow  in  so  few  months 
his  remarkable  successs  in  Santiago,  his  appoint 
ment  as  Governor-General  of  Cuba,  his  quick  and 
successful  organization  and  administration  of  the 
Island  so  that  it  could  be  turned  over  to  the 
Cubans  in  such  short  order — all  tended  to  fan  the 
flames  of  prejudice.  Hence  when  the  opportunity 
of  the  Rathbone  affair  occurred  the  flames  became 
a  veritable  conflagration,  which,  however,  burned 
only  those  who  brought  the  charges  and  touched 
the  character  of  Wood  himself  not  at  all. 

In  the  meantime  early  in  1903  he  started  upon 
his  duties  in  the  Philippines.  Instead  of  proceed 
ing  by  the  usual  route  through  California  and 


The  Statesman 


over  the  Pacific  to  Manila,  Wood  decided  to  make 
the  voyage  the  other  way  round  with  a  definite 
plan  for  acquiring  data  upon  his  new  subject  and 
relative  to  his  new  duties  as  he  went  along. 

In  Egypt  he  spent  some  time  with  Lord  Cromer, 
then  just  preparing  to  give  up  his  work  there  as 
Viceroy.  Cromer,  like  all  other  persons  in  execu 
tive  capacities  throughout  the  world,  knew  well 
all  that  General  Wood  had  done  in  Cuba.  He 
had  a  very  high  appreciation  of  what  had  been 
accomplished  in  the  time,  because  from  his  own 
experience  he  knew  better  than  most  men  what  the 
difficulties  had  been.  He  took  a  great  liking  for 
the  quiet,  stalwart  American  and  told  him  that  his 
administration  in  Cuba  was  one  of  the  finest  in 
Colonial  history  and  the  best  in  our  generation. 
Later  when  Lord  Cromer  was  asked  to  suggest 
some  one  to  succeed  himself  in  Egypt  he  said 
that  unfortunately  the  best  man  was  unavailable 
since  he  was  an  American  citizen  named  Leonard 
Wood. 

He  gave  him  all  the  facilities  for  studying  the 
government  and  administration  of  the  British 
protectorate  and  helped  him  wherever  and  when- 
173 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

ever  he  could.  Wood's  great  interest  was  the 
study  of  the  way  in  which  men  of  different  and 
conflicting  religious  beliefs  were  handled,  and  he 
collected  large  quantities  of  books  and  documents 
to  be  studied  later  as  he  proceeded  eastward.  No 
man  could  have  asked  for  higher  appreciation  than 
was  accorded  him  voluntarily  by  the  able  and 
experienced  administrator  of  Egyptian  affairs. 

From  Cairo  he  proceeded  to  India  and  spent 
sufficient  time  to  accumulate  information  there.  He 
was  to  govern  a  Mohammedan  population  mixed 
up  with  Confucians,  cannibals,  headhunters  and 
religions  of  twenty  different  varieties,  and  he 
studied  as  he  went  along  all  the  methods  employed 
in  similar  situations  to  preserve  order  without 
creating  religious  wars. 

He  even  made  a  special  journey  to  Java  at  the 
invitation  of  the  Dutch  government,  where  the 
Dutch  governor  gave  him  all  the  assistance  in  his 
power.  Here  he  found  the  problem  more  closely 
allied  to  his  own  than  elsewhere. 

So  that  on  his  arrival  in  Manila  he  had  gath 
ered  information  upon  most  of  the  problems 
which  would  shortly  confront  him  from  sources 
174 


The  Statesman 


of  unquestioned  authenticity  and  from  men  of 
unquestioned  ability.  Some  friend  one  night  in 
Manila  spoke  of  the  large  number  of  books  that 
filled  the  walls  of  his  house  and  wondered  when  he 
expected  to  get  time  to  read  them.  Wood's  answer 
was  that  he  had  read  them  all  and  only  used  them 
now  as  reference  books  to  refresh  his  memory. 

New  as  the  problems  were,  therefore,  he  had  by 
the  time  he  began  active  work  as  Governor  what 
ever  preparation  any  one  could  secure  for  the 
work  in  hand. 

The  Spaniards  had  failed  in  their  government 
in  the  Philippines  as  they  had  elsewhere.  In  Min 
danao  and  Sulu — the  country,  or  islands,  inhab 
ited  by  the  Moros — they  had  failed  signally  be 
cause  of  their  intolerance  of  the  religious  beliefs 
of  the  people  and  their  careless  impatience  gen 
erally  towards  a  colony  which  from  its  very  nature 
could  not  produce  much  money.  Furthermore  they 
did  not  send  sufficient  military  forces  or  sufficiently 
able  officers  to  maintain  their  supremacy.  And 
finally  they  did  not  deal  with  the  people  through 
the  native  clergy  and  priests.  Consequently  when 
the  Americans  came  in  the  Moros  were  united  only 
175 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

in  their  hatred  of  the  white  race,  placed  no  confi 
dence  in  anything  their  rulers  told  them  and  only 
obeyed  white-man-made  laws  as  long  as  the  white 
man  was  in  sight. 

After  all  a  sultan  or  datu  had  his  position  and 
authority  which  had  come  down  to  him  through 
generations  and  his  religion  which  had  been  taught 
him  from  birth.  He  saw  no  reason  why  he  should 
give  up  these  without  a  struggle  just  because  some 
other  man  arrived  with  a  different  religion  and  a 
different  form  of  sultan  government.  The  coun 
try  was  such  that  it  was  easy  to  avoid  the  new 
rulers.  Transportation  over  large  parts  of  the 
southern  islands  was  through  jungle  and  pathless 
forests  where  even  riding  a  horse  was  impossible. 
Streams  without  bridges,  settlements  without  ap 
proaches  except  a  trail,  tropical  climates  to  which 
only  the  Moros  themselves  were  accustomed  spread 
over  a  land  of  almost  impenetrable  jungle.  The 
Moros  themselves  understood  such  a  situation  and 
could  easily  move  from  one  spot  to  another,  one 
island  to  another,  one  settlement  to  another; 
while  the  army  had  to  fight  its  way  in  and  then 
fight  its  way  out  again. 
176 


The  Statesman 


While  the  problem  of  administration  was  not 
unlike  that  in  Cuba  in  so  far  as  the  organizing 
of  courts,  law,  education,  native  officials  and  so 
on  went,  there  were  here  in  Moroland  the  infinitely 
more  difficult  and  delicate  tasks  of  dealing  with 
many  different  religious  laws  and  customs  and 
the  hereditary  rank  and  rights  of  tribal  rulers, 
none  of  which  existed  in  Cuba. 

The  quality  of  statesmanship  in  Wood  which 
dealt  with  these  problems  and  settled  them  so  that 
from  a  slave-holding,  polygamous,  headhunting 
land  there  arose  a  self-governing  community  is  of 
the  highest  order. 

It  was  put  into  force  in  the  commander's  usual, 
commonplace,  thorough  way  without  haste  or 
excitement,  but  where  necessary  by  force  of  arms 
which  required  more  than  a  hundred  engagements 
and  many  hard-fought  battles.  Wood  first  spent 
some  time  in  Manila  going  over  the  situation  with 
Mr.  Taft.  There  he  learned  Taft's  wishes  and 
views  and  prepared  his  military  forces.  He  was 
both  military  commander  and  civil  governor  of 
the  Moroland  and  as  such  was  again  an  absolute 
autocrat.  When  he  was  ready  he  started  directly 
177 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

into  the  jungle  from  Zamboanga.  The  journey 
took  him  and  his  staff  through  forests,  over  un- 
fordable  rivers,  across  mountain  ranges  on  foot, 
across  the  straits  that  separated  one  island  from 
another  in  dugouts,  into  forts,  into  towns,  into 
villages  and  hamlets  in  a  nerve-racking  journey 
of  over  a  month  without  a  pause  except  for  neces 
sary  sleep. 

He  wanted  to  see  with  his  own  eyes  and  hear 
with  his  own  ears  at  first  hand  what  was  the  con 
dition  of  affairs,  what  was  going  on,  what  were 
the  different  and  varying  situations  in  order  that 
he  might  the  more  correctly  and  certainly  draw 
up  plans  for  the  reorganization  of  the  colony. 
In  one  village  he  was  a  military  commander  issu 
ing  orders ;  in  another  he  was  a  criminal  or  civil 
judge  sitting  in  session;  in  another  he  was  a 
listener  to  the  advancement  of  the  plans  and  the 
religious  ceremonials  of  the  sultans  or  datus  of 
the  place. 

Naturally  all  came  to   see  him.     He  was   the 

embodiment  of  the  new  conquerors  and  curiosity 

alone    would    have    brought    every    one,    to    say 

nothing  of  policy  which  brought  those  who  desired 

178 


The  Statesman 


to  impress  him  in  order  that  special  favors  might 
be  expected  for  themselves.  He  was  the  Great 
White  Sultan  judged  by  the  standards  known  to 
their  other  sultans. 

And  the  problems  were  infinitely  varied  and  in 
most  cases  entirely  new  ones  to  the  "doctor  from 
Boston." 

But,  as  in  other  places,  he  used  his  own  methods 
in  each  instance  to  settle  the  particular  problem, 
always  emphasizing  the  one  great  fact  that  if  the 
Moros  would  deal  fairly  with  the  Government  of 
the  United  States  they  would  benefit  as  never 
before,  secure  fair  and  just  treatment  and  be 
assured  of  their  right  to  live  in  peace. 

Yet  when  things  became  a  little  clogged  he 
took  immediate  steps  to  clear  the  situation  with 
force  if  necessary,  but  always  with  diplomacy  if 
that  could  be  made  to  do  the  job. 

"In  Jolo  there  was  a  mess.  The  puffed-up  Sul 
tan,  with  whom  General  Bates  in  1899  had  made 
a  treaty  by  which  the  Sultan  engaged  to  keep 
order,  was  away  in  Singapore  having  a  'time.' 
His  brother,  the  Rajah  Mudah,  was  acting  as 
regent.  The  sub-chiefs  and  datus  were  in  a  great 
179 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

row.  The  Moros  were  murdering  and  robbing, 
all  over  the  island.  General  Wood  led  an  expedi 
tion  to  find  out  what  was  the  matter.  It  was  not 
a  punitive  expedition,  but  rather  one  meant  to  let 
the  natives  see  the  stalwart  soldiers  of  the  United 
States  and  understand  the  futility  of  resisting 
them.  The  Rajah  Mudah  was  sulky.  The  Gen 
eral  sent  him  a  polite  invitation  to  visit  him  in 
camp  near  Maibun,  the  Rajah's  town.  Mudah 
returned  word  that  he  was  ill.  Another  invitation 
failed  to  budge  him.  General  Wood  ordered 
Colonel  Scott  to  pay  a  call  upon  the  sick  Rajah 
and  to  take  along  a  company  of  infantry.  Colonel 
Scott  and  Captain  Howard  found  the  Rajah 
lounging  among  his  pillows.  He  greeted  them  in 
the  languid  accents  of  the  sick.  Solicitous  in 
quiries  about  the  nature  of  his  malady  were  made. 
The  Rajah  had  a  boil.  Colonel  Scott  was  deeply 
sympathetic.  Would  the  Rajah  object  to  showing 
his  boil.  Perhaps  the  visitors  might  be  able  to 
suggest  a  remedy.  The  Rajah  did  not  show  his 
boil.  Captain  Howard  put  his  company  into  line. 
The  Rajah  sat  up  with  a  jerk,  and  Moros  came 
running  from  all  directions  to  see  what  was  hap- 
180 


The  Statesman 


pening.  Colonel  Scott  very  quietly  explained  that 
the  soldiers  had  been  sent  as  a  guard  of  honor 
to  escort  the  Rajah  to  the  General.  If  the  Rajah 
was  quite  sure  that  he  was  feeling  sufficiently 
strong  to  travel,  they  would  go. 

"Peering  through  half  shut  eyes,  the  Rajah 
Mudah  pondered  for  a  moment.  Then  he  an 
nounced  that  he  felt  greatly  improved  and  that 
undoubtedly  his  condition  would  be  immensely 
helped  by  a  ride  in  the  air. 

"General  Wood  greeted  him  cordially  and  cere 
moniously.  He  personally  conducted  him  around 
the  camp,  pointing  out  what  fine,  big  men  our 
soldiers  were,  and  especially  directing  his  atten 
tion  to  the  machine  guns.  Would  the  Rajah  like 
to  see  the  guns  in  operation? 

"After  the  guns  had  mowed  down  a  few  trees 
the  Rajah's  face  assumed  a  thoughtful  expression. 
He  became  enthusiastically  friendly."* 

Such  methods  in  time  made  an  impression.  Even 
the  Moro  mind  began  to  absorb  the  fact  that  it 
was  much  better  to  accept  the  invitation  than  to 
undergo  what  followed  any  failure  to  do  so. 

*  World's  Work. 

181 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Wood  had  also  to  add  to  his  difficulties  in  the 
beginning  the  prejudice  of  army  officers  he  found 
in  the  islands.  The  older  men  over  whom  he  had 
been  promoted  by  President  McKinley  had  no 
love  for  him.  They  called  him  a  doctor.  He  was 
not  of  the  army  fraternity.  They  had  heard  that 
he  had  done  well,  but  not  by  established  methods. 
The  younger  officers  took  their  cue  from  their 
seniors  and  so  did  the  enlisted  men.  It  was  a  diffi 
cult  problem,  or  series  of  problems,  through  which 
he  had  to  steer  a  careful  course.  But  he  did  it 
and  turned  the  tide  entirely  in  the  other  direction. 

He  did  it  by  always  taking  his  share  of  the 
hard  work.  Object  lessons  of  this  sort  multiplied 
as  time  went  on.  When  troops  were  sent  out  to 
an  engagement  Wood  went  with  them  and  kept 
in  the  front  line.  When  they  camped  for  the 
night  in  the  jungle  he  had  the  same  bed — the 
ground.  When  they  had  little  or  nothing  to  eat, 
he  had  the  same.  Once  when  they  came  out  upon 
the  beach  of  one  of  the  islands  after  a  hard  trip 
Wood's  launch  was  reported  a  hundred  yards  off 
the  surf  ready  with  cooling  fans,  a  good  mat- 
tressed  bed,  excellent  food  and  a  bath.  He  told 
182 


The  Statesman 


the  orderly  that  he  would  stay  with  the  men  and 
sent  him  back  to  the  launch,  taking  no  more  notice 
.of  the  matter  except  to  scrape  out  a  new  hollow 
in  the  burning  sand  in  the  hope  of  finding  a  cooler 
spot  to  sleep. 

Such  episodes  repeated  again  and  again  soon 
made  a  vital  change  of  views  in  regard  to  the  new 
governor  and  commander.  They  occurred  so  regu 
larly  and  so  often  that  it  appeared  true — this 
taking  what  came  along  in  the  day's  work  with 
the  others — not  a  case  of  trying  to  produce  effect 
now  and  then.  Mr.  R.  H.  Murray,  in  his  article 
written  in  1912,  quoted  above,  speaks  of  an  officer 
who  served  under  Wood  at  this  time  and  as  he 
says  quotes  him  as  literally  as  he  can : 

"When  Wood  first  came  out  in  1903,  the  army 
in  the  Philippines  didn't  know  him.  There  were 
plenty  of  officers  who  reviled  him  as  a  favorite  of 
the  White  House,  and  cussed  him  out  for  it. 
Pretty  soon  the  army  began  to  realize  that  he 
was  a  hustler;  that  he  knew  a  good  deal  about 
the  soldier's  game;  that  he  did  things  and  did 
them  right;  that,  when  reveille  sounded  before 
daybreak,  he  was  usually  up  and  dressed  before 
183 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

us ;  that,  when  a  man  was  down  and  out,  and  he 
happened  to  be  near,  he'd  get  off  his  horse  and 
see  what  the  matter  was  and  fix  the  fellow  up,  if 
he  could ;  that  when  he  gave  an  order  it  was  a 
sensible  one  and  that  he  didn't  change  it  after  it 
went  out;  and  that  he  remembered  a  man  who 
did  a  good  piece  of  work  and  showed  his  appre 
ciation  at  every  chance. 

"Well,  the  youngsters  began  to  swear  by  Wood, 
and  the  old  chaps  followed,  so  that  from  'cussing 
him  out'  they  began  to  respect  him  and  then  to 
admire  and  love  him.  That's  the  word — love.  It's 
the  easiest  thing  in  the  world  to  pick  a  fight  out 
there  now  by  saying  something  against  Wood.  It 
is  always  the  same  when  men  come  in  contact  with 
him.  I  don't  honestly  believe  there  is  a  man  in 
the  department  now  who  wouldn't  go  to  hell  and 
back  for  Leonard  Wood." 

It  was  again  much  the  same  story  as  in  Cuba. 
It  was  not  only  the  personality  of  the  man  him 
self,  his  personal  magnetism,  but  the  quiet  sim 
plicity  of  his  methods  backed  by  knowledge  and 
good  judgment.  It  was  the  absence  of  doing 
anything  for  effect,  anything  of  the  personal 
184 


The  Statesman 


"ego ;"  the  getting  of  things  done  quietly,  without 
ferment  or  conversation.  And  back  of  it  all  the 
absolute  certainty  of  every  one  who  worked  with 
or  under  him  that  Leonard  Wood  would  do 
exactly  what  he  said  he  would,  even  though  he 
said  it  quite  quietly  only  once  and  even  though 
the  doing  of  it  meant  a  military  expedition,  a 
battle  and  the  death  of  many  a  good  man  who 
perhaps  knew  nothing  of  the  real  reasons. 

Here  again  space  is  too  limited  to  permit  of  an 
account  of  the  work  done  by  Wood  which  made 
a  group  of  pirates  into  a  relatively  law-abiding 
community.  Yet  some  attempt  to  picture  the 
situation  is  necessary  in  order  to  give  a  slight 
idea  of  what  the  problem  was. 

It  should  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  country 
over  which  he  was  made  Governor-General  con 
sisted  of  two-thirds  of  the  Island  of  Mindanao 
and  the  Sulu  Archipelago — a  long  chain  of  large 
and  small  islands  extending  almost  to  Borneo. 
The  inhabitants  were  principally  Mohammedans, 
known  to  the  Spaniards  as  Moros.  Along  the 
coast  of  Mindanao  were  scattered  small  Philip 
pine  settlements — Christian  Filipinos.  Widely 
185 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

separated  back  in  the  islands  were  numerous  tribes 
speaking  different  dialects.  In  appearance  they 
were  not  unlike  the  Diacs  of  Borneo.  Some  of 
them  were  headhunters.  Among  some  of  them 
cannibalism  still  existed  in  the  form  of  religious 
ceremonies. 

The  Moros  were  the  masters  of  all  the  seas  in 
this  vicinity.  They  were  the  old  Malay  pirates 
so  well  known  in  books  of  travel.  The  Spaniards 
had  waged  intermittent  war  against  them  since 
early  in  1600,  but  they  never  effectively  conquered 
them.  They  would  send  down  a  large  expedition, 
win  a  victory  and  withdraw.  This  procedure, 
however,  made  little  or  no  impression  on  the 
pirates,  who  shortly  returned  to  their  trade  when 
the  Spanish  victors  had  returned  home. 

The  Moros  were  all  fanatical  Mohammedans,  in 
tolerant  of  Christians  or  Christian  influence,  and 
when  the  Spaniards  arrived  in  Manila  about  1537 
they  dominated  all  the  seas  about  the  Philippine 
Islands.  They  were  armed  with  all  kinds  of 
firearms,  ranging  from  the  old  Queen  Bess  muzzle- 
loader  to  the  most  modern  rifles.  Their  artillery 
ranged  from  the  broadside  guns  of  battleships  of 
186 


The  Statesman 


the  18th  Century  to  a  smaller  cannon  of  bronze, 
made  principally  in  Borneo.  They  were  bold, 
adventurous  sailors,  slave  traders  and  slave  hunt 
ers  and  successfully  terrorized  the  hill  tribes. 
Indeed,  they  were  greatly  feared  along  the  coast 
of  Mindanao. 

Early  in  the  American  occupation  a  treaty  had 
been  made  with  the  Sultan  of  Sulu,  who  claimed 
the  headship  of  Moros  from  the  Island  of  Sulu 
northward  to  the  great  Island  of  Mindanao.  In 
Mindanao  there  were  different  sultans  who  claimed 
headships  in  their  own  districts,  and  foremost 
amongst  these  was  Datu  Ali,  who  had  waged  a 
long  and  successful  war  with  the  Spaniards. 

Here  then  was  a  difficult  problem:  to  establish 
civil  government  among  these  wandering  hill 
tribes,  Filipino  settlements,  and  piratical  Mo 
hammedan  groups,  each  fearing  and  hating  the 
other.  General  Wood's  first  task  as  he  conceived 
it  was  to  stop  slave-trading  and  establish  relations 
of  tolerance,  if  not  friendship,  between  the  Filip 
inos  and  the  Moros  on  the  one  hand  and  be 
tween  the  Moros  and  the  hill  tribes  on  the  other; 
to  stop  the  Christian  Filipinos  from  imposing 
187 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

on  the  hill  tribes;  and  to  begin  some  method  for 
substituting  respect  for  law  and  order,  for  gov 
ernment  and  authority  in  the  place  of  terror  and 
hatred.  The  ending  of  the  slave  trade  resulted 
in  many  heavy,  long-drawn-out  fights  with  the 
principal  Moro  bands.  The  Sultan  of  Sulu  had 
not  lived  up  to  the  Bates  Treaty  and  he  had  to 
be  deposed,  therefore,  as  a  sovereign  in  Sulu. 

The  next  step  was  to  organize  some  form  of 
government  that  would  fit  the  situation.  To  start 
this  Wood  divided  the  entire  Moro  area,  including 
the  islands,  into  districts  and  appointed  American 
officers  of  experience  and  ability  as  governors  of 
the  districts. 

He  then  visited  Borneo  and  studied  carefully 
the  laws  and  regulations  under  which  that  char 
tered  colony  governed  the  Malays  within  its 
borders.  The  policy  laid  down  by  him  for  the 
district  governors  was  to  stop  slave-trading  and 
the  taking  of  life  and  property  at  once ;  to  estab 
lish  next  friendly  relations  between  the  people 
living  on  the  coast  and  the  timid  tribes  up  in  the 
hills;  to  build  up  commerce  on  a  fair  basis;  to 
open  up  trails  and  lines  of  communication  between 
188 


The  Statesman 


villages ;  to  assure  to  every  one,  no  matter  what 
his  religion,  a  fair  deal.  He  also  laid  great  stress 
on  the  necessity  of  bringing  the  headmen  of  the 
different  tribes  into  contact  with  the  district  gov 
ernors  and  of  doing  all  that  could  be  done  to 
build  up  and  increase  commerce. 

At  the  same  time  the  new  and  energetic  Gov 
ernor-General  instituted  a  strong  policy  to  stop 
forever  the  inhuman  practices  and  customs  highly 
repugnant  to  what  Americans  considered  humane 
conduct.  Every  effort  was  made  to  insure  better 
treatment  of  women,  who  up  to  that  time  had  been 
nothing  more  nor  less  than  chattels.  On  the  sea- 
coast  trading  stations  were  built  and  put  in  charge 
of  men  who  spoke  the  dialect  of  the  wild  people. 
At  these  stations  there  was  always  a  provincial 
agent  who  had  authority  to  see  that  the  hill  people 
got  fair  prices  for  their  products  and  just  treat 
ment  from  the  Malays.  Little  by  little  as  a  result 
of  this  wise  and  sane  policy  they  were  all  induced 
to  come  to  the  stations  and  make  their  head 
quarters  there  during  the  trading  period.  In 
former  times  they  had  been  accustomed  to  bring 
down  their  heavy  loads  of  jungle  products  on  their 
189 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

shoulders  and  rather  than  stay  in  the  neighbor 
hood  of  the  pirates  over  night  they  would  sell 
their  goods  for  anything  they  could  get  and  hurry 
up  into  the  hills  again  before  dark.  Moro,  Fili 
pino  and  Chinese  traders  had  for  centuries  sys 
tematically  robbed  them.  Money  was  of  little 
use  to  them  and  therefore  all  trading  was  by 
barter.  It  was  a  long  campaign  of  education 
which  Wood  instituted  to  build  up  confidence 
amongst  these  timid  people,  and  he  sent  young 
American  officers  among  them,  traveling  often 
times  hundreds  of  miles  on  foot  and  practically 
without  any  protection  to  help  them  and  give 
them  confidence. 

Little  by  little  confidence  was  built  up;  great 
peace  meetings  were  arranged  among  the  different 
tribes ;  old  grudges  were  wiped  out ;  scores  were 
balanced  and  old  feuds  settled.  It  took  time  and 
brains  and  painstaking  patience,  but  it  was  done 
and  done  well. 

At  the  same  time,  taking  a  leaf  from  his  own 

Cuban   notebook,   Wood    started    schools    in    the 

Filipino    villages     and    took    steps    to    do    the 

same  among  the  Moros.     It  was  very  difficult  to 

190 


The  Statesman 


find  teachers  who  would  be  received  by  these  Mos 
lems.  It  was  at  first  almost  impossible  to  get 
them  to  send  their  children  to  school  at  all. 
Nothing  but  time  and  sound,  honest  methods  in 
dealing  with  these  people  made  all  or  any  of  this 
possible. 

Patrol  boats  were  put  on  duty  in  the  waters 
about  the  islands.  Simultaneous  with  this  build 
ing  up  went  the  organization  of  the  customs 
service,  since  the  province  had  to  be  entirely  self- 
supporting.  Native  people  from  among  the 
Moros  and  Filipinos  were  organized  into  what 
was  called  the  constabulary.  Every  effort  was 
made  to  turn  the  attention  of  the  people  from 
irregular  and  piratical  activities  to  the  activities 
of  commerce.  School  laws  were  put  in  force, 
written  in  terms  to  meet  the  situation.  Increased 
cultivation  of  new  land,  cultivation  of  cocoanuts, 
cocoa,  and  various  local  products,  including  hemp, 
was  encouraged  by  exempting  it  from  taxation 
provided  certain  amounts  of  useful  crops  were 
planted  thereon. 

Communications  by  land  and  water  were  built 
up  as  fast  as  possible.  After  a  time  taxation  was 
191 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

imposed  very  gradually  in  the  form  of  a  cedula, 
or  poll  tax.  The  money  so  collected  was  spent  so 
far  as  possible  in  the  district  where  it  was  collected. 
The  headmen  of  the  tribes  and  sub-tribes  were 
made  officials  of  the  province  and  given  a  baldric 
bearing  a  brass  shield  with  the  seal  of  the  prov 
ince.  In  time  they  were  given  certain  police 
authority  for  the  maintenance  of  order.  If  the 
local  headman  could  not  handle  the  situation,  the 
local  constabulary  was  called  in.  If  they  in  turn 
were  not  sufficient,  then  the  troops  were  sent  into 
the  area. 

A  free  man's  life  was  worth  fifty-two  dollars 
and  a  half  in  gold;  a  male  slave  one-half  this 
amount;  a  free  woman  was  worth  as  much  as  a 
male  slave ;  a  female  slave  half  as  much  as  a  male 
slave,  and  a  modern  rifle  about  two  hundred  dol 
lars  in  gold. 

As  the  simple  processes  of  law  came  to  be  bet 
ter  understood  natives  were  encouraged  to  appeal 
from  the  tribal  to  the  district  court,  consisting 
of  the  district  governor  and  the  local  priests  or 
headmen,  who  advised  the  former  upon  tribal  cus- 
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toms  and  scales  of  punishment,  in  order  that  no 
injustice  should  be  done  to  any  one. 

Gradually  appeals  were  taken  from  the  district 
courts  to  the  regular  insular  courts,  which  were 
represented  by  itinerant  judges  of  the  first  in 
stance.  The  latter  belonged  to  the  regular  Philip 
pine  judiciary  and  were  at  this  time  all  Americans. 
Women  were  given  equal  status  before  the  law 
and  the  rights  of  property  were  safeguarded. 

After  the  first  hard  fighting  the  need  for  the  use 
of  troops  gradually  diminished  and  more  and 
more  of  the  policing  work  was  done  by  the  native 
constabulary.  The  wildest  regions  became  prac 
tically  safe. 

After  the  districts  were  in  working  order  mu 
nicipalities  and  townships  were  established  and 
the  framework  of  civic  organization  begun.  The 
Mohammedan  religion  was  left  undisturbed.  Reli 
gious  freedom  was  guaranteed  to  both  Moham 
medans  and  Christians.  In  addition  to  the  Catholic 
missionaries  who  had  been  working  there  for  hun 
dreds  of  years,  missionaries  of  other  denomina 
tions  commenced  to  take  active  interest  in  the 
situation.  The  revenue  was  sufficient  to  maintain 
193 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

the  province  in  good  shape  and  there  was  a  con 
siderable  amount  of  money  in  reserve. 

Thus  in  three  years,  with  the  knowledge  he  had 
acquired  in  Cuba  supplemented  by  his  visits  and 
study  amongst  the  colonies  of  other  nations  where 
similar  problems  existed,  with  his  extraordinary 
energy  and  capacity  for  working  through 
innumerable  subordinates,  Leonard  Wood  again 
built  up  a  community  out  of  nothing  but  land 
and  human  beings.  But  in  the  Philippine  instance 
he  built  up  a  community  largely  governing  itself 
upon  a  system  of  laws  still  in  force — though  three 
governors  have  succeeded  him — from  a  hopeless 
mass  of  Christian  Filipinos,  Chinese  traders, 
Malay  pirates,  Mohammedans,  cannibals  and 
feudal  tribes. 

It  was  a  remarkable  instance  of  state  building, 
which  following  upon  the  Cuban  episodes,  stands 
out  as  the  greatest  achievement  any  man  has 
accomplished  in  Colonial  history. 

It  is  impossible  to  state  the  relative  importance 

of  this  work  without  appearing  to  overdo  it.     Yet 

if  we  could  but  collect  the  tributes  that  have  been 

paid    to    Wood    upon    its    accomplishment    they 

194 


The  Statesman 


would  make  a  volume.  Richard  Olney  wrote: 
".  .  .  to  congratulate  you  personally  on  the  most 
successful  and  deservedly  successful  career, 
whether  as  soldier  or  public  man  of  any  sort,  that 
the  Spanish  War  and  its  consequences  have 
brought  to  the  front."  John  Hay,  then  Secretary 
of  State,  wrote  Wood  a  note  "with  sincere  con 
gratulations  on  the  approaching  fruition  of  all 
your  splendid  work  for  the  regeneration  of  Cuba," 
and  Senator  Platt,  of  Connecticut,  wrote  of  his 
"admiration  for  your  administration  under  diffi 
culties  greater  I  think  than  have  ever  had  to  be 
encountered  by  any  one  man  in  reconstruction 
work."  So  the  record  of  two  statesmenlike  and 
administrative  works  stands  to  this  day  as  a  wit 
ness  of  Wood's  qualities. 

In  1905  after  a  visit  to  the  United  States  he 
returned  to  the  islands  and  became  commander-in- 
chief  of  the  American  forces  in  the  Philippines, 
General  Bliss  taking  his  place  as  Governor  of  the 
Moros,  who  were  now  established  under  a  basic 
form  of  government  and  procedure  which  Wood 
had  inaugurated. 

By  1908  this  work  was  practically  completed 
195 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

and  the  procedure  laid  out  for  the  future  rule  of 
that  part  of  the  Philippines.  At  that  time  Gen 
eral  Wood  was  transferred  to  Governor's  Island 
in  New  York  Harbor  as  Commander  of  the  De 
partment  of  the  East,  strangely  enough  the  first 
command  he  had  held  within  the  United  States 
since  the  Geronimo  days  in  the  Southwest. 

There  followed  in  the  next  six  years  a  diplomatic 
mission  as  special  Ambassador  to  the  Argentine 
Republic  upon  the  occasion  of  the  centenary  of 
Argentina,  where  he  met  and  talked  with  General 
von  der  Goltz,  the  German  officer,  who  had  so 
much  to  do  with  the  Great  War  later.  From  this 
meeting  Wood  absorbed  more  of  the  necessity  for 
universal  military  training  and  more  of  the  aver 
sion  to  a  standing  army  such  as  existed  in  Ger 
many.  After  this  mission  he  became  the  head 
of  the  American  military  forces  under  the  Presi 
dent  of  the  United  States  and  for  four  years 
held  the  position  of  Chief  of  Staff. 

Thus  beginning  his   army  life  in   1886  as   an 

army  surgeon  he  rose  in  twenty-two  years  to  the 

highest  position  in   the   regular   army   that  any 

one  can  hold.     That,  in  a  sense,  closes  a  certain 

196 


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period  in  General  Wood's  career.  For  when  in 
1914  he  was  again  made  Commander  of  the  De 
partment  of  the  East  he  had  already  started  upon 
his  campaign  of  national  preparation  which  had 
been  growing  and  growing  in  his  mind  as  he  lived 
and  served  his  own  nation  and  observed  and 
studied  other  nations.  The  knowledge  he  had 
acquired  in  the  four  quarters  of  the  earth  showed 
to  him  conclusively  that  a  nation  must  be  ready 
to  resist  attack  in  order  to  live  in  peace,  and  yet 
that  that  nation  must  not  spend  all  its  wealth  and 
time  and  brains  in  building  up  a  military  machine. 
In  a  strange  way  the  attitude  of  this  New  Eng 
land  "Mayflower"  descendant  resembled  the  at 
titude  of  his  own  native  Cape  Cod,  which  stands 
at  the  outposts  of  New  England  with  its  clenched 
fist  ready  and  prepared,  yet  which  lives  on  quietly 
in  the  lives  of  its  inhabitants  who  proceed  in  peace 
with  their  commercial  occupations  and  their  fam 
ily  existence. 


THE  PATRIOT 


VIII 

THE  PATRIOT 

"THERE  are  many  things  man  cannot  buy  and 
one  of  them  is  time.  It  takes  time  to  organize 
and  prepare.  Time  will  only  be  found  in  periods 
of  peace.  Modern  war  gives  no  time  for  prepara 
tion.  Its  approach  is  that  of  the  avalanche  and 
not  of  the  glacier. 

"We  must  remember  that  this  training  is  not 
a  training  for  war  alone.  It  really  is  a  training 
for  life,  a  training  for  citizenship  in  time  of  peace. 

"We  must  remember  that  it  is  better  to  be 
prepared  for  war  and  not  have  it,  thftn  to  have 
war  and  not  to  be  prepared  for  it." 

Such  sentiments  quoted  from  General  Wood's 
many  speeches  and  writings  might  be  continued 
until  they  alone  made  a  volume — a  book  of  the 
Creed  of  the  Patriot.  For  in  his  crusade  up  and 
down  our  land  for  the  last  six  years  he  has 
developed  an  unsuspected  ability  for  epigrammatic 
phraseology,  for  stating  in  concise,  homely  lan- 
201 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

guage  the  principle  that  no  one  in  any  successful 
operation  has  failed  to  get  ready.  This  was  un 
suspected  in  him,  because  up  to  1913  he  had  had 
little  to  say  outside  of  his  official  reports.  His 
motto  of  doing  the  thing  without  talking  about  it 
had  been  followed  to  the  letter  by  himself. 

When  he  finally  arrived  at  a  position  which  was 
important  and  powerful  enough  to  give  him  an 
opportunity  for  putting  his  beliefs  into  effect, 
when  he  furthermore  arrived  at  a  point  where 
there  was  not  the  immediate  necessity  for  feeding 
a  starving  people,  or  fighting  a  hostile  military 
force,  or  reorganizing  a  tumbled-down  state,  or 
doing  any  of  the  things  demanding  immediate 
action  with  which  he  had  been  employed  during 
most  of  his  life — then  with  characteristic  energy 
he  did  begin.  Time  could  not  be  bought  by  him 
any  more  than  it  could  be  by  others  and  his 
work  of  preparednesss  had  to  await  a  period  of 
peace  when  the  time  was  at  hand.  This  period 
having  arrived  in  1912  and  1913  he  found  that 
in  order  to  produce  any  impression,  to  get  action 
upon  this  plan,  he  must  not  only  have  a  high  and 
powerful  position  but  he  must  awaken  the  public 
202 


THE    PATRIOT 


The  Patriot 


to  its  importance  before  he  could  expect  legislative 
or  departmental  action.  Hence  the  volume  of  the 
Creed  of  the  Patriot. 

With  his  accustomed  energy  therefore  he 
started  upon  a  campaign  of  writing,  speaking  and 
promoting  in  all  ways  open  to  him  to  bring  this 
new  plan  before  the  people  of  this  country  and 
in  doing  so  he  developed  the  hitherto  unsuspected 
qualities  of  a  speaker  of  the  highest,  because  the 
simplest  and  most  homely  order. 

To  him  there  was  nothing  new  in  the  plan  of 
preparedness  for  the  nation.  He  might  have  said 
to  himself  in  1913:  "I  have  found  that  in  order 
to  be  a  doctor  a  young  man  must  study  so  many 
years ;  in  order  to  fight  Apache  Indians  success 
fully  a  man  must  train  for  a  physical  condition 
that  permits  him  to  walk  and  ride  and  live  harder 
than  his  already  trained  opponents,  that  he  must 
train  soldiers  for  that  particular  job,  must  train 
and  care  for  horses  to  cover  that  particular  coun 
try.  I  have  found  by  sad  experience  that  to  have 
a  regiment  of  Rough  Riders  in  proper  condition 
to  fight  Spaniards  in  Cuba  the  men  must  be  taught 
by  long  training  to  understand  military  principles, 
203 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

subordination  to  military  rule  of  procedure,  the 
use  of  guns  and  animals  and  the  laws  and  tactics 
of  military  action  in  the  field ;  that  these  men 
must  be  taught  to  take  care  of  themselves  in  the 
open,  that  ammunition  and  equipment  must  be  at 
hand  and  in  use.  I  have  found  that  in  order  to 
produce  order  in  a  community  where  there  is  no 
order,  health  in  a  land  where  there  is  only  sickness, 
happiness  amongst  a  people  where  there  is  only 
misery  and  fear  and  worry — in  order  to  do  all 
this  laws  must  be  made  and  respected,  people  must 
learn  that  they  owe  something  to  their  state  and 
that  they  are  responsible  for  honest  care,  adminis 
tration  and  thoughtfulness  of  those  who  look  to 
them  as  they  look  to  their  state.  I  have  found 
that  where  nothing  but  force  will  do  the  trick, 
force  must  be  prepared  and  ready  in  advance.  I 
have  seen  innocent  persons  go  under  because  they 
were  not  ready  to  offset  depredations.  I  have 
seen  nations  injured  and  destroyed  because  they 
were  not  ready  to  resist  force,  whether  that  force 
were  used  in  a  just  or  an  unjust  cause.  And  now 
I  have  arrived  at  the  place  where  I  can  prove  this 
to  a  nation  instead  of  to  a  military  platoon,  or  a 
204 


The  Patriot 


military  staff,  or  a  few  Cuban  or  Philippine  offi 
cials." 

He  might  have  said  all  this  to  himself — doubt 
less  has  done  so  many,  many  times  with  much 
more  to  the  same  effect — but  the  outcome  is  a 
witness  of  the  fact  that  he  has  from  a  long  and 
active  life  as  fighter,  soldier,  organizer,  adminis 
trator,  diplomat  and  statesman  in  the  West,  the 
South,  in  Europe,  in  Asia,  in  Cuba,  in  the  Philip 
pines,  in  South  America,  in  Washington — in  most 
parts  of  the  earth — learned  again  and  again  that 
nothing  can  be  really  done  on  the  spur  of  the 
moment,  that  everybody  must  prepare  from  school 
days  to  death.  And  in  1913  he  had  his  first  real 
opportunity  to  preach  this  nationally  to  all  the 
people  of  his  own  native  land. 

That  within  a  year  of  that  time  prepared  Ger 
many  should  have  upset  the  world  and  found  the 
British  Empire,  the  French  Republic  and  the 
Italian  Kingdom  unprepared — to  say  nothing  of 
the  United  States — may  have  been  one  of  the  acci 
dents — strokes  of  fortune — that  some  people  say 
have  made  General  Wood.  But  it  would  seem 
that  the  only  thing  this  Great  War  did  in  this 
205 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

connection  was  to  prove  by  a  terrific  example  that 
Wood  and  those  with  him  were  right  and  that  those 
who  were  against  him  were  wrong. 

If  the  war  had  not  come,  it  would  have  taken 
longer  to  awaken  this  country  to  the  facts  and  it 
would  have  delayed  perhaps  the  growth  of  General 
Wood's  name  as  that  of  a  national  and  interna 
tional  character  of  highest  importance.  But  it 
would  not  have  changed  the  truth  of  his  Creed — 
or  rather  the  creed  of  which  he  has  become  the 
great  protagonist.  Nor  does  the  fact  that  the 
war  did  come  when  it  did  give  any  ground  for 
making  Wood  one  of  the  greatest  citizens  of  our 
country  to-day  because  he  preaches  preparedness. 
General  Wood  stands  at  the  forefront  of  the 
leaders  in  America  at  this  time  because  of  his 
own  personal  make-up  and  character  and  because 
of  the  amazing  variety  and  extent  of  his  services 
to  his  country  which  are  written  upon  every  page 
of  its  history  during  the  last  thirty  years.  It  is 
the  variety  of  things  done  which  puts  him  in  his 
present  position,  just  as  it  is  the  variety  of  high 
qualities  that  has  made  the  great  men  of  all  times 
great.  King  David  was  not  only  the  greatest 
206 


The  Patriot 


general  of  his  time.  He  was  one  of  the  greatest 
administrators  of  all  time  and  perhaps  the  great 
est  poet  that  ever  lived.  Washington  was  not 
only  a  fighter  of  the  highest  order.  He  was  one 
of  the  great  generals  of  history ;  and  a  statesman 
and  ruler  of  a  higher  order  still. 

It  might  very  aptly  be  said,  therefore,  that 
General  Wood's  campaign  for  national  prepared 
ness  was  only  the  accomplishment  of  a  task  for 
which  he  had  all  his  life  been  preparing  himself. 

Upon  his  return  trip  from  the  Philippines  in 
1908  he  had  come  by  the  way  of  Europe  studying 
always  military  systems.  There  was  a  short  stop 
in  Ceylon,  in  Singapore,  in  Egypt,  in  Malta  and 
Gibraltar  and  a  summer  spent  in  Switzerland,  os 
tensibly  for  health  recuperation  after  the  tropical 
life  in  Moroland  and  Manila.  At  the  same  time 
this  gave  opportunity  for  a  closer  study  of  the 
Swiss  system  which  with  an  admixture  of  the 
Australian  system  furnished  the  basis  for  the 
training  camps  afterwards  inaugurated  by  him 
here. 

At  the  same  time  he  had  the  opportunity  by 
invitation  of  seeing  the  German  and  French 
207 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

armies  mobilized  at  the  time  of  the  Bosnia-Herze 
govina  episode  when  all  Europe  was  on  the  verge 
of  war.  The  German  army  of  maneuver  was  at 
Saarbriicken — ready.  Practically  the  whole  of 
the  French  army  maneuver  was  on  the  Loire — 
ready.  He  saw  one  immediately  after  the  other — 
less  than  two  days  apart.  Mr.  White,  then  Amer 
ican  Ambassador  to  France,  asked  him  what  he 
thought  of  the  French  army  and  his  answer  was 
that  despite  the  fame  of  the  German  military  ma 
chine  France  in  the  next  war  would  surprise  the 
world  by  the  fighting  effectiveness  of  her  forces. 
He  based  this  conclusion  on  the  relation  of  officers 
and  men  and  the  discipline  founded  on  respect  and 
confidence  rather  than  fear  of  officers. 

Then  followed  the  centenary  mission  to  the 
Argentine  and  a  couple  of  years  as  Chief  of  Staff 
of  the  American  army  before  he  could  effectively 
begin  his  campaign. 

The  first  gun  was  a  letter  sent  out  by  Wood 
under  permission  of  the  Secretary  of  War  which 
proposed  to  many  presidents  of  colleges  and  uni 
versities  in  the  United  States  the  establishment 
of  several  experimental  military  training  camps 
208 


The  Patriot 


for  students.  These  camps  were  to  be  placed  one 
on  the  historic  field  of  Gettysburg  and  the  other 
at  the  Presidio  of  Monterey,  California.  The 
former  opened  on  July  7th  and  closed  on  August 
15th,  and  the  latter  extended  from  July  1st  to 
August  8th.  In  all  222  students  took  this  train 
ing,  159  at  Gettysburg  and  63  in  Monterey. 

It  was  the  first  trial,  and  it  was  a  very  small 
and  insignificant  response.  Indeed  it  gives  a  good 
idea  of  the  importance  in  which  military  prepared 
ness  was  held  in  this  country  at  that  moment — 
100,000,000  inhabitants;  222  volunteers. 

Those  were  the  days  when  the  people  of  this 
land  and  many  others  were  hard  at  work  upon 
commercial  pursuits  and  when  for  amusement  the 
world  and  his  wife  danced  tango  to  ragtime  music. 
So-called  alarmists  cried  "Look  out  for  war !" 
Major  Du  Maurier  of  the  British  army  wrote  a 
play  called  "An  Englishman's  Home,"  which 
startled  and  puzzled  Englishmen  for  a  while,  but 
could  not  carry  an  audience  for  one  week  in  this 
country.  Nobody  took  any  interest  in  what  his 
neighbor  was  doing,  to  say  nothing  of  what  Ger 
many  or  any  other  countries  were  planning. 
209 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Yet  Wood  was  not  discouraged.  He  was  started 
on  a  long  campaign  and  he  knew  he  had  to  prepare 
to  prepare.  Furthermore  the  men  in  the  univer 
sities  who  could  see  ahead  came  forward  in  his 
support  and  in  support  of  the  idea.  Four  years 
later  President  Drinker  of  Lehigh  University 
wrote  of  the  amazing  success  of  the  movement: 
"We  owe  it  largely  to  Major-General  Wood's  far 
sightedness  as  a  man  of  affairs  and  to  his  great 
qualities  as  a  soldier  and  patriot,  that  our  country 
was  awakened  to  the  need  of  preparedness,  and 
this  beginning  of  military  training  in  our  youth 
was  due  wholly  to  his  initiative."  * 

Small  as  the  beginning  was  it  was  a  plant  with 
the  germ  of  strength  in  it,  since  at  this  first  camp 
in  Gettysburg  the  members  formed  then  in  1913 
the  Society  of  the  National  Reserve  Corps  of  the 
United  States.  Wood  at  once  cooperated  with 
this  slender  offshoot  and  gave  it  all  the  support  in 
his  power.  He  sent  letters  as  Chief  of  Staff  of 
the  Regular  Army  to  college  presidents  at  the 
same  time  that  the  president  of  the  new  Corps  did 
so — both  suggesting  an  advisory  committee  to 

*  National  Service  Magazine. 
210 


The  Patriot 


assist  the  government  in  the  encouragement  and 
practical  advancement  of  the  training  camp  idea. 
This  committee  was  formed  and  Presidents  Hibben 
of  Princeton  and  Drinker  of  Lehigh  were  elected 
president  and  secretary.  The  committee  with 
these  officers  in  charge  gave  assistance  to  Wood  in 
his  organizing  work  so  that  out  of  the  small  be 
ginnings  in  the  two  camps  an  enormous  organiza 
tion  arose  which  trained  tens  of  thousands  of 
young  men  to  be  officers  and  made  the  immense  ex 
pansion  of  the  little  American  army  to  4,000,000 
soldiers  possible. 

Pushing  always  quietly  but  unremittingly  ahead 
Wood  helped  these  officers  to  increase  the  camps 
from  two  to  four  in  the  summer  of  1914 — in  Ver 
mont,  Michigan,  North  Carolina  and  California — 
with  a  total  attendance  of  667  students. 

Then  came  the  Great  War  and  the  beginning 
of  the  work  on  a  large  scale.  From  college  stu 
dents,  who  reported  on  the  interest  and  pleasure 
which  they  got  out  of  the  summer  camp,  the  life  in 
the  open  and  the  military  instruction  afforded  by 
regular  army  men,  the  movement  extended  to  busi 
ness  men,  lawyers,  preachers  and  so  on.  Wood 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

opened  the  Plattsburg  camp  on  Lake  Champlain  to 
the  latter  and  started  the  first  business  man's  camp. 
Each  man  paid  his  own  railway  fares,  his  own  living 
expenses  while  in  camp  and  bought  his  uniform  and 
equipment,  except  arms,  with  his  own  money. 

That  year  (1915)  3,406  men  attended  the  five 
camps.  In  1916  six  camps  were  opened  and  16,139 
men  attended  them.  At  the  close  of  the  first 
Plattsburg  camp  the  business  men  formed  an  or 
ganization  for  furthering  and  extending  this  train 
ing  just  as  the  college  men  had  done  at  Gettysburg 
two  years  before.  And  in  1916  these  two  organi 
zations  consolidated  and  organized  the  present 
Military  Training  Camps  Association  of  the 
United  States. 

All  through  this  period,  taking  advantage  of 
the  European  war,  drawing  lessons  from  the  tragic 
happenings  just  across  the  Atlantic,  Wood  went 
about  the  country,  as  little  "Bobs"  of  Kandahar 
had  previously  done  in  England,  speaking  in  halls, 
in  camps,  in  churches,  at  clubs,  at  festivals,  on 
special  and  unspecial  occasions  of  all  kinds.  He 
drove  home  the  subject  which  he  knew  so  well  and 
others  knew  hardly  at  all.  He  met  all  comers  of 


The  Patriot 


every  grade  in  arguments  and  debates — those  who 
were  constitutional  objectors,  pacifists,  people 
who  thought  arbitration  much  more  effective,  peo 
ple  too  proud  to  fight  or  too  busy  to  get  ready — 
all  comers  of  all  kinds.  And  the  Great  War  day 
by  day  helped  him.  He  spent  his  summers  going 
from  one  camp  to  another,  traveling  all  over  the 
United  States. 

At  six  in  the  morning  he  would  appear  in  one 
of  them  ready  for  inspection,  and  any  day  any 
where  where  there  was  a  camp  one  might  see  him  in 
the  early  morning  sunshine,  or  the  early  morning 
rain  striding  up  one  company  street  and  down  an 
other  followed  by  new  and  old  officers,  peering  into 
this  dog  tent  and  that  kitchen,  examining  this 
man's  rifle  and  that  man's  kit,  praising,  criticizing 
and  jamming  enthusiasm  in  two  hours  into  a  group 
of  a  thousand  men  in  a  manner  they  knew  not  how, 
nor  clearly  understood.  It  was  just  what  he  had 
done  in  Cuba,  just  what  he  had  done  in  the  Philip 
pines  where  he  had  organized  drilling,  athletic  and 
condition-of-equipment  competitions  in  each  com 
pany,  each  regiment,  each  brigade,  each  division — 
one  pitted  against  another,  all  at  it  hot  and  heavy ; 
213 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

not  because  Wood  came  along  and  looked  them 
over,  but  because  when  he  did  look  them  over  he 
could  spot  any  weakness  in  any  part  of  the  work 
with  unerring  certainty — not  alone  because  he 
could  spot  any  weakness,  but  because  he  knew  a 
good  point  when  he  saw  it  and  gave  credit  where 
credit  was  due. 

It  is  perhaps  not  out  of  place  here  to  look  back 
in  the  light  of  events  which  occurred  afterwards 
and  are  now  a  part  of  history  and  secure  an  esti 
mate  of  what  this  work  did  for  this  country  in 
awakening  the  people  to  a  sense  of  the  critical 
situation,  to  prepare  an  army  which  should  do  its 
part  in  the  world  war,  to  bring  that  army  into 
line  in  France  at  what  seems  to  have  been  a  critical 
moment  and  to  help  bring  the  war  itself  to  a  suc 
cessful  conclusion  in  conjuction  with  the  Allied 
armies  which  had  held  on  so  long  against  such  ter 
rific  odds. 

The  purpose  of  the  camps  and  what  they  will 
lead  to  in  time  of  peace  and  did  lead  to  in  time 
of  war  is  perhaps  best  shown  in  one  of  General 
Wood's  statements:  "The  ultimate  object  sought 
is  not  in  any  way  one  of  military  aggrandizement, 


The  Patriot 


but  to  provide  in  some  degree  a  means  of  meeting 
a  vital  need  confronting  us  as  a  peaceful  and  un- 
military  people,  in  order  to  preserve  the  desired 
peace  and  prosperity  through  the  only  safe  pre 
caution,  viz. :  more  thorough  preparation  and 
equipment  to  resist  any  effort  to  break  the 
peace." 

That  at  a  time  when  there  was  no  European 
War  in  sight. 

Now  consider  General  Pershing's  report  of 
Nov.  21,  1918— after  the  close  of  the  war.  The 
first  American  air  force  using  American  aero 
planes  went  into  action  in  France,  that  is  to  say 
in  the  war,  in  August,  1918 — 16  months  after  the 
declaration  of  war  by  the  United  States  and  four 
years  after  the  beginning  of  the  war  itself.  Dur 
ing  the  entire  time  that  the  United  States  was  in 
the  war,  a  little  over  19  months,  not  one  single 
American  field  gun  was  fired  at  the  enemy  and  only 
109  had  been  received  in  Europe  at  all.  No  Amer 
ican  tank  was  ever  used  against  the  enemy  in  the 
whole  war.  Yet  a  month  or  six  weeks  after  the 
declaration  of  war  troops  began  to  go  to  Europe 
and  at  its  close  in  November,  1918,  the  army  con- 
215 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

sisted  of  3,700,000  men,  of  whom  more  than 
203,000  were  newly  made  officers.  Half  of  this 
force  at  least  got  over  to  the  other  side  of  the 
Atlantic  and  at  least  half  of  them  took  part  in  the 
fighting  at  one  time  or  another  of  the  19  months. 

One  would  have  said  at  the  outset  that  a  com 
mercial  nation  like  the  United  States,  filled  with 
factories,  mechanics  and  mechanically  inclined 
brains,  could  and  would  have  made  guns  and  aero 
planes  and  uniforms  far  quicker  than  it  made 
soldiers  and  officers.  Yet  such  was  not  the  case. 

A  French  officer  here  in  America  at  that  time 
studying  American  mobilization  said: 

"I  knew  you  recruited  over  3,500,000  men  in 
19  months.  That  is  very  good,  but  not  so  diffi 
cult.  But  I  am  told  also  that  although  you  had 
no  officers'  reserve  to  start  with  you  somehow 
found  200,000  new  officers,  most  of  them  compe 
tent.  That  is  what  is  astonishing  and  what  was 
impossible.  Tell  me  how  that  was  done."* 

There  is  only  the  one  answer,  that  the  officers' 
training  camps  started  in  1913  by  Leonard  Wood 
and  fostered  by  him  and  the  people  of  this  nation 

*  National  Magazine. 

216 


The  Patriot 


who  then  and  later  agreed  with  him  made  the  im 
possible  possible  and  made  the  new,  raw  army 
effective  and  in  time.  It  was  what  came  to  be 
known  as  the  "Plattsburg  Idea;"  which,  getting 
really  going  first  in  May  15,  1917,  as  a  regular 
part  of  the  United  States  mobilization,  did  its 
work  before  arms  and  ammunition  were  ready, 
before  uniforms  could  be  had,  before  camps  had 
been  even  laid  out  and  before  the  first  draft  had 
been  taken.  At  that  time  40,000  selected  men 
were  in  training  for  officers'  positions  in  sixteen 
camps.  That  is  to  say,  in  40  days  150,000  appli 
cations  had  been  received,  100,000  men  examined 
and  40,000  passed  as  fit  and  ready  for  training. 

It  was  the  work  in  1913,  1914,  1915  and  1916. 
It  was  the  Plattsburg  idea  adapted  to  war  condi 
tions.  Without  it  the  situation  regarding  men 
might  easily  have  been  the  same  as  the  situation 
regarding  guns,  aeroplanes  and  uniforms. 

Plattsburg,  being  in  New  York  State,  naturally 
became  the  type  of  camp,  since  in  1914  Wood, 
having  been  relieved  of  his  position  as  Chief  of 
Staff,  was  detailed  to  command  the  Department 
of  the  East  with  his  headquarters  on  Governor's 
217 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Island  in  New  York  Harbor.  He  no  sooner  took 
up  this  new  work  than  the  Department  of  the 
East,  where  fifty-six  per  cent,  of  the  National 
Guard  of  the  whole  country  was  included,  became 
a  seething  office  of  energy  and  work.  In  so  far 
as  the  training  camp  idea  went  this  energy  was 
centered  in  Plattsburg. 

At  the  same  time  General  Wood  inaugurated 
the  Massachusetts  National  Guard  Maneuvers — 
the  first  of  their  kind  held  in  this  country — and 
added  a  water  attack  on  Boston.  He  also  as 
sisted  Governor  Whitman  in  putting  through  the 
New  York  State  Legislature  the  bills  creating 
the  State  Military  Training  Commission,  under 
whose  management  all  boys  between  the  ages  of 
sixteen  and  eighteen  undergo  a  simple  but  effec 
tive  training  in  the  rudiments  of  military  tactics 
and  receive  the  athletic  training  of  a  short  camp 
life  each  year — all  involving  the  inculcation  of 
the  principles  of  discipline,  of  order  and  of  self 
care. 

Thus  the  history  of  the  way  in  which  the  Gov 
ernment  of  the  United  States,  when  war  was 
eventually  declared,  secured  its  officers  is  told. 
218 


The  Patriot 


One  might  go  into  detail,  but  the  main  facts  are 
not  altered  by  any  amount  of  detail.  They  stand 
out  clearly — the  awakening  of  our  land  in  time 
by  the  energy  and  patriotic  spirit  of  one  man, 
supplemented  by  the  untold  amount  of  work  ac 
complished  at  his  suggestion  by  thousands  of 
patriotic  American  citizens. 

And  in  the  midst  of  this  work  before  war  was 
declared  General  Wood,  as  a  part  of  his  plan  of 
preparedness,  asked  some  ten  or  twelve  men  to 
come  to  Plattsburg  at  different  times  to  speak  to 
the  student  officers.  Among  these  men  he  included 
the  two  living  ex-presidents  of  the  United  States 
— Mr.  Taft  and  Colonel  Roosevelt.  He  first  sub 
mitted  the  list  of  speakers  to  the  War  Depart 
ment  so  that  the  Department  might  eliminate  any 
one  of  them  who  for  any  reason  should  appear  to 
be  undesirable. 

After  two  weeks,  having  had  no  reply,  he  sent 
out  the  invitations  and  from  time  to  time  these 
speakers  came  and  addressed  the  members  of  the 
different  camps. 

Roosevelt  on  his  arrival  at  Plattsburg  handed  to 
Wood  the  speech  he  proposed  to  deliver;  and 
219 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

in  view  of  the  known  critical  attitude  which  the 
former  took  towards  the  administration  Wood 
asked  two  other  army  officers  to  go  over  the  pro 
posed  speech  with  him  and  help  him  to  eliminate 
anything  which  might  be  questioned  upon  such  an 
occasion.  The  address  was  delivered  at  about  five 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon  at  the  camp  and  when 
it  was  finished  Roosevelt  was  heartily  congratu 
lated  personally  by  many  men  of  both  political 
parties,  among  them  two  distinguished  Democrats 
— John  Mitchel,  Mayor  of  New  York,  and  Dudley 
Field  Malone,  Collector  of  the  Port  of  New  York. 

After  dinner  Roosevelt  left  in  the  evening  to 
go  into  the  city  of  Plattsburg,  a  mile  or  two  away 
from  the  camp,  to  take  the  midnight  train  for  New 
York.  As  he  stood  on  the  platform  of  the  rail 
way  station  some  time  after  eleven  in  the  evening 
he  was  interviewed  by  the  newspaper  reporters. 
No  military  person  was  present.  What  he  said 
was  given  out  on  territory  not  under  military 
jurisdiction  and  it  had  nothing  to  do  with  the 
Plattsburg  speech.  Roosevelt  spoke  to  the  news 
paper  men  in  his  usual  forcible  fashion: 

"In  the  course  of  his  speech  he  remarked  that 
220 


The  Patriot 


for  thirteen  months  the  United  States  had  played 
an  ignoble  part  among  the  nations,  had  tamely 
submitted  to  seeing  the  weak,  whom  we  had  cove 
nanted  to  protect,  wronged;  had  seen  our  men, 
women  and  children  murdered  on  the  high  seas 
'without  action  on  our  part,'  and  had  used  elocu 
tion  as  a  substitute  for  action.  'Reliance  upon 
high  sounding  words  unbacked  by  deeds,'  said  he, 
'is  proof  of  a  mind  that  dwells  only  in  the  realm 
of  shadow  and  of  sham.'  Under  the  Hague  Con 
vention  it  was  our  duty  to  prevent,  and,  if  not  to 
prevent,  then  to  undo,  the  hideous  wrong  that  was 
done  in  Belgium,  but  we  had  shirked  this  duty. 
He  denounced  hyphenated  Americans,  profes 
sional  pacifists  and  those  who  would  substitute 
arbitration  treaties  for  an  army,  or  the  plati 
tudes  of  peace  congresses  for  military  prepared 
ness." 

The  next  day  Wood  received  a  telegraphic  rep 
rimand  from  the  Government  in  Washington. 
"In  this  telegram  of  disapproval,  Secretary  Gar 
rison  said  it  was  difficult  to  conceive  of  anything 
which  could  have  a  more  detrimental  effect  than 
such  an  incident.  The  camp,  held  under  the  Gov- 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

ernment  auspices,  was  conveying  its  own  impres 
sive  lesson  in  its  practical  and  successful  operation 
and  results.  'No  opportunity  should  have  been 
furnished  to  any  one  to  present  to  the  men  any 
matter  except  that  which  was  essential  to  the 
necessary  training  they  were  to  receive.  Any 
thing  else  could  only  have  the  effect  of  distracting 
attention  from  the  real  nature  of  the  experiment, 
diverting  consideration  to  issues  which  excite 
controversy,  antagonism  and  ill-feeling,  and 
thereby  impairing,  if  not  destroying,  what  other 
wise  would  have  been  so  effective.'  General  Wood 
replied,  as  follows :  'Your  telegram  received,  and 
the  policy  laid  down  will  be  rigidly  adhered  to.'  "* 
*  The  Independent. 


THE  GREAT  WAR 


IX 

THE  GREAT  WAR 

ON  APRIL  6,  1917,  war  having  been  that  week 
declared  by  the  United  States  against  Germany, 
Major-General  Leonard  Wood,  ranking  officer  in 
the  United  States  Army — that  is  to  say,  the  man 
occupying  the  senior  position  in  our  army — 
being  then  in  sound  health  of  mind  and  body  and 
fifty-six  years  of  age,  wrote  and  personally  de 
livered  two  identical  letters,  one  to  the  Adjutant- 
General  of  the  Army  and  the  other  to  the  Chief  of 
Staff,  requesting  assignment  for  military  service 
abroad. 

No  acknowledgment  or  reply  was  ever  received 
from  either  source. 

Early  in  April  he  received  notice  that  the  De 
partment  of  the  East  of  which  he  was  then  com 
mander  was  abolished  and  in  its  place  three  new 
and  smaller  departments  created,  in  spite  of 
vigorous  protests  by  several  Governors  of  Atlantic 
States.  He  was  offered  any  one  of  the  following 
225 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

three  military  positions  that  he  might  select — the 
Philippines,  Hawaii  or  the  "less  important  post" 
at  Charleston,  South  Carolina. 

He  at  once  selected  the  post  at  Charleston. 

On  May  12th  he  proceeded  to  Charleston  and 
began  the  organization  of  the  Southeastern  De 
partment.  In  the  months  immediately  following 
he  had  selected  and  laid  out  eleven  large  training 
camps  and  had  taken  charge  of  the  supervision  of 
three  officers'  training  camps,  one  at  Oglethorpe, 
one  at  Atlanta  and  one  at  Little  Rock. 

On  August  26th  he  received  orders  to  proceed 
to  Camp  Funston  in  Kansas  to  command  the  can 
tonment  there  and  train  for  service  a  division  of 
national  troops  designated  as  the  89th  Division. 

Towards  the  end  of  the  year  he  was  ordered  to 
proceed  to  Europe  to  observe  the  military  opera 
tions  of  the  war.  Leaving  Camp  Funston  the  day 
before  Thanksgiving,  he  landed  in  Liverpool  on 
Christmas  Day,  1917.  In  London  he  called  by 
invitation  upon  General  Robertson,  the  British 
Chief  of  Staff,  and  upon  his  old  friend,  Sir  John 
French.  He  then  proceeded  to  Paris  on  Decem 
ber  31,  and  between  January  2nd  and  14th,  1918, 
226 


The  Great  War 


went  over  the  British  front  with  Generals  Cator 
and  Rawlinson.  On  the  16th  he  was  at  Soissons 
with  the  French. 

For  the  next  few  days  the  examination  of  the 
French  front  continued  at  and  near  the  Chemin 
des  Dames  sector. 

On  January  27th  he  went  with  some  French  of 
ficers  and  men  and  a  number  of  American  of 
ficers  to  look  into  the  work  of  the  6th  French 
army  training  school,  where  artillery  practice 
was  in  progress  at  Fere-en-Tardenois.  He  was 
standing  behind  a  mortar,  the  center  man  of  the 
five  officers  watching  the  gun  crew  fire  the  mortar, 
when  a  shell  burst,  or  detonated,  inside  the  gun. 

The  entire  gun  crew  was  blown  to  pieces.  The 
four  officers  on  either  side  of  General  Wood  were 
killed.  He  himself  received  a  wound  in  the  muscles 
of  the  left  arm  and  lost  part  of  the  right  sleeve 
of  his  tunic.  Six  fragments  of  the  shell  passed 
through  his  clothing  and  two  of  them  killed  the 
officers  on  either  side  of  him.  He  was  the  only 
man  within  a  space  of  twelve  feet  of  the  mortar 
who  was  not  instantly  killed.  Many  were  wounded, 
including  two  others  of  our  own  officers. 
227 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

After  a  night  in  the  field  first-aid  hospital,  where 
his  arm  was  dressed,  he  motored  approximately  a 
hundred  miles  to  Paris  the  next  day  and  went  into 
the  French  officers'  hospital  in  the  Hotel  Ritz. 

This  hospital  was  in  the  old  portion  of  the  Ritz 
Hotel.  General  Wood  was  the  first  foreign  officer 
to  be  admitted  to  it.  It  was  full  of  wounded 
French  officers  and  men  from  the  different  fronts ; 
some  of  them  from  Salonika ;  some  sent  back  from 
Germany,  hopelessly  crippled,  and  held  as  unfit 
for  further  service  by  the  Germans;  and  many 
from  the  Western  front. 

Here  he  got  very  near  the  soul  of  the  French 
Army  and  came  in  touch  with  that  indomitable 
spirit  which  made  that  army  fight  best  and  hardest 
when  things  looked  darkest.  Thanks  to  an  excel 
lent  physical  condition  he  made  a  rapid  recovery, 
described  by  French  surgeons  as  found  only  among 
the  very  young.  He  was  a  guest  of  the  French 
Government  while  at  the  hospital  and  received 
every  possible  courtesy.  On  the  16th  of  February 
after  having  talked  with  many  of  the  French  offi 
cers  in  the  hospital  and  called,  at  their  request, 
upon  Clemenceau,  President  Poincare,  Joffre  and 
228 


The  Great  War 


others,  he  left  Paris  entirely  cured  of  his  slight 
wound  and  proceeded  to  the  headquarters  of  the 
French  Army  of  the  North  at  Vizay.  There  he 
met  and  talked  with  Generals  D'Esperey  and  Gou- 
rand,  visited  Rheims  and  Bar-le-duc  and  spent  the 
day  of  the  20th  at  Verdun. 

During  the  next  few  days  he  visited  the  United 
States  Army  headquarters  at  Chaumont  and  Toul 
and  was  back  in  Paris  on  the  26th,  when  he  re 
ceived  orders  from  the  A.  E.  F.  to  return  to  the 
United  States  by  way  of  Bordeaux.  On  the  21st 
of  March  he  arrived  in  New  York  and  was  sum 
moned  four  days  later  to  appear  before  the  Senate 
committee  on  military  affairs  to  report  his  obser 
vations. 

He  was  then  examined  by  the  Mayo  examining 
board,  pronounced  absolutely  fit  physically  and 
on  April  12th  resumed  command  of  the  89th 
Division  at  Camp  Funston,  Kansas. 

The  training  of  this  division  was  practically 
finished  in  late  May  and  the  89th  was  thereupon 
ordered  abroad  for  service. 

After  seeing  some  of  the  elements  of  the  division 
off  for  the  evacuation  station  at  Camp  Mills,  Long 
229 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

Island,  New  York,  General  Wood  left  Funston 
himself  and  proceeded  to  Mills  to  see  to  the  recep 
tion  of  his  division  and  look  to  its  embarkation. 
He  arrived  at  the  Long  Island  camp  on  May  25th 
and  there  found  an  order  from  the  War  Depart 
ment  relieving  him  of  his  command  of  the  89th 
Division  and  instructing  him  to  proceed  to  San 
Francisco  to  assume  command  of  the  Western 
Department.  After  finishing  some  necessary 
work  he  went  to  Washington  on  the  27th  and  saw 
the  Secretary  of  War.  Little  is  known  of  what 
took  place  at  this  conversation  except  that  Gen 
eral  Wood  requested  that  he  be  reinstated  in  his 
command  of  the  89th  Division  and  sent  abroad, 
which  was  refused. 

Wood  saw  the  President,  explained  the  situation 
and  was  told  that  the  latter  would  take  the  mat 
ter  under  consideration. 

No  consideration  was  ever  reported. 

Meantime  the  order  sending  him  to  California 
created  such  an  uproar  throughout  the  United 
States  that  it  was  rescinded  and  General  Wood 
was  ordered  to  Camp  Funston  again  to  train  a 
new  division — the  10th — which  was  ready  to  go 
230 


The  Great  War 


abroad  when  the  armistice  was  signed  on  No 
vember  llth. 

This  constitutes  General  Wood's  services  to  his 
country  during  the  period  of  the  war. 

Much  might  be  said  in  regard  to  this  history. 
Much  might  be  surmised  as  to  the  causes  which 
led  to  keeping  the  man  who  was  the  senior  officer 
of  the  army  out  of  the  war  entirely.  Much — very 
much — has  been  said  throughout  this  country  in 
and  out  of  print  during  the  past  two  years.  The 
theory  that  he  was  too  old  for  active  service  could 
not  be  a  reason,  since  he  is  younger  than  many 
general  officers  who  did  see  service  abroad — 
younger  as  a  matter  of  fact  than  General  Pershing 
himself.  It  is  hardly  conceivable  that  physical 
condition  could  have  been  a  reason,  since  at  least 
twice  in  the  last  two  years  he  has  been  passed  by 
expert  physical  examination  boards  in  the  regular 
routine  of  army  life  and  found  sound,  mentally 
and  physically.  He  does,  to  be  sure,  limp  and 
has  had  to  do  so  for  years  on  account  of  an  acci 
dent  in  Cuba  fifteen  or  sixteen  years  ago.  Yet 
this  could  hardly  unfit  him  for  service  in  France 
when  it  did  not  unfit  him  for  service  in  the  Philip- 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

pine  jungle,  or  the  active  life  which  he  has  led 
for  the  past  ten  years. 

There  has  been  considerable  surmise  as  to 
whether  his  amazing  campaign  for  preparedness, 
his  speeeches  and  his  many  activities  in  the  officers' 
training  camps  organization  and  administration 
prejudiced  the  authorities  against  him.  This 
again  is  hardly  credible  since  it  is  manifestly  in 
conceivable  that  those  men  in  charge  of  the  prose 
cution  of  our  part  in  the  great  war,  with  the  im 
mense  responsibility  resting  upon  their  shoulders, 
could  possibly  have  allowed  personal  prejudice 
and  favoritism  to  have  played  any  part  in  their 
decision  in  regard  to  any  man — least  of  all  the 
most  important  man  in  the  Regular  Army. 

Some  controversy  arose  as  to  whether  Wood's 
friendship  and  relation  to  Theodore  Roosevelt 
might  not  have  created  hostility  in  administration 
and  army  circles.  This  again  is  beyond  credence 
when  the  importance  of  the  men  on  both  sides  is 
considered  and  the  terrific  importance  of  events 
at  the  time  is  taken  into  account.  Here  again  it 
is  inconceivable  that  any  man  or  group  of  men 
could  at  such  times  and  in  such  circumstances 


The  Great  War 


allow  anything  personal  to  sway  his  or  their 
judgment. 

The  incontestable  fact  still  remains,  however, 
that  the  one  man  in  the  Army  who  by  his  whole 
life  in  the  United  States,  in  many  parts  of  the 
earth,  had  during  a  period  of  thirty  years  been 
preparing  himself  for  just  such  an  occasion,  who 
had  for  four  years  been  trying  to  get  the  people 
of  the  country  and  the  government  to  prepare, 
who  had  appeared  before  Senate  military  com 
missions  and  other  similar  bodies  and  registered 
his  belief  in  the  necessity  for  certain  measures,  all 
of  which  were  adopted  by  the  Government  as  rec 
ommended  by  him — that  the  one  man  who  had 
done  all  this  should  not  have  been  selected  to  do 
any  active  service  whatever  at  the  front,  but 
should  have  been  offered  posts  in  the  Philippines, 
Hawaii  and  California  when  he  was  applying  for 
service  in  France.  Lloyd  George  wanted  him; 
France  wanted  him;  and  the  American  Army 
wanted  him. 

All  sorts  and  conditions  of  men  throughout  the 
United  States  expressed  their  opinion  upon  the 
subject  during  this  war  period  and  are  doing  so 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

still,  but  the  one  man  who  has  said  nothing  is 
General  Wood  himself.  With  his  inherited  and 
acquired  characteristic  of  doing  something,  of 
never  remaining  idle,  with  the  habit  acquired 
from  years  of  military  discipline  and  respect  for 
orders  emanating  from  properly  constituted 
authority,  he  put  in  his  application  again  and 
again  for  service  and  then  accepted  without  public 
comment  whatever  orders  were  issued  to  him. 

Here  again  is  the  same  simple,  direct  mind  of 
the  man  who  has  at  no  time  lost  his  sense  of  pro 
portion,  who  has  not  become  excited  because  his 
chance  was  not  given  him — the  chance  for  which 
he  had  spent  long  years  of  preparation — who  did 
not  let  this  outward  wallpaper — plaster — showy 
thing  divert  him  from  the  essential  point,  the 
great  beam  of  our  war  preparation  house — the 
necessity  that  every  man,  woman  and  child  should 
do  all  he  or  she  could  do  to  help  the  Government 
of  the  United  States  carry  the  war — or  our  part 
of  it — to  a  successful  conclusion  when  that  Gov 
ernment  finally  made  up  its  mind  to  go  in. 

Wood  declined  to  become  a  martyr.  He  had 
no  bitter  feelings.  He  was,  as  any  other  man  of 


The  Great  War 


his  prominence  and  character  would  be,  disap 
pointed  at  having  no  opportunity  to  serve  his 
country  at  the  front.  But  he  took  what  came  to 
him  and  did  it  as  usual  with  extraordinary  quick 
ness,  effectiveness  and  thoroughness. 

Indeed  speculation  on  the  subject  is  not  likely 
to  produce  much  profit.  It  is  only  of  importance 
in  the  present  place  as  illustrating  again  the 
make-up  of  the  subject  of  this  biographical  sketch. 
He  took  no  steps  other  than  those  regularly  and 
properly  open  to  him  to  secure  service.  He  at 
tempted  no  roundabout  methods.  He  kept  his 
own  counsel  and  followed  his  old  maxim  of  "Do  it 
and  don't  talk  about  it."  His  requests  for  reasons 
for  denying  him  of  all  men  the  right  to  fight  for 
his  country  on  the  battle  line  made  through  proper 
channels — never  otherwise — produced  no  answers 
in  any  case  and  to  this  day  the  whole  amazing 
episode  is  entirely  without  explanation. 

Meantime  the  man's  characteristic  energy  and 
thoroughness  produced  extraordinary  results  in 
other  fields. 

In  his  short  sojourn  in  Charleston  it  was  his 
duty  to  select  and  prepare  at  once  a  certain  num- 
235 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

ber  of  camps,  or  cantonments  as  they  came  to  be 
called,  within  the  jurisdiction  of  the  South  East 
ern  Department.  And  this  he  proceeded  to  do  with 
great  rapidity.  Not  only  were  all  the  sites  he 
selected  passed  without  exception,  but  they  proved 
to  be  in  every  instance  safe,  sanitary  and  suffi 
cient  for  the  purpose.  This  was  no  easy  matter 
with  almost  every  town  and  city  in  the  South 
sending  delegations  to  him  to  ask  that  it  be 
selected  as  the  site  of  one  of  the  camps,  with  the 
prodigious  amount  of  political  influence  brought 
to  bear  from  all  sides  and  with  the  necessity  of 
offending  nobody,  of  making  all  work  towards  one 
end — the  immediate  preparation  for  homes  for 
the  men  who  were  to  make  the  new  army. 

It  was  all  so  skillfully  handled  that  there  is  not 
a  place  in  the  South  of  any  size  which  has  not 
sounded  and  does  not  sound  the  praises  of  Gen 
eral  Wood.  He  selected  the  camps  and  made  them 
with  that  experience  and  knowledge  that  were  his 
because  of  the  fact  that  he  was  an  army  officer 
and  a  doctor  who  had  done  much  the  same  thing 
and  had  had  much  the  same  work  in  Cuba  and 
the  Philippines. 

236 


The  Great  War 


One  would  expect  something  of  the  sort  from 
any  able  man  with  such  preparation,  but  one 
would  not  expect  such  a  man  to  leave  the  Depart 
ment  with  the  extraordinary  popularity  and  the 
multitude  of  expressions  of  good  will  and  affection 
which  Wood  carried  away  with  him  after  these 
few  months  of  work. 

In  the  midst  of  the  journeyings  to  and  fro  to 
look  over  possible  sites  and  all  the  work  entailed 
in  preparing  the  camps  he  found  time  to  supervise 
the  three  officers'  training  camps  already  men 
tioned,  which  were  carried  out  upon  the  lines  of 
the  earlier  ones  with  the  aid  of  the  Officers'  Train 
ing  Camps  Association. 

Upon  being  transferred  to  Camp  Funston  near 
Fort  Riley  in  Kansas,  Wood  began  in  the  first 
days  of  September,  1917,  the  training  of  a  new 
division  of  raw  recruits  from  the  selective  draft. 
He  had  the  assistance  of  a  nucleus  of  army  officers 
and  some  few  army  men,  but  the  bulk  of  the  divi 
sion  consisted  of  new  men  and  of  new  officers 
recently  from  the  officers'  training  camps.  And 
this  work  was  well  on  its  way  and  the  division 
237 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

taking  form  when  he  received  orders  to  go  to 
Europe. 

It  is  difficult  in  this  limited  space  to  go  into 
the  details  of  his  work  abroad,  and  most  of  it  in 
any  case  was  technical  matter  more  adapted  to 
a  military  report.  The  results  of  some  of  his 
conversations  are,  however,  of  interest  now  as 
showing  the  situation  as  it  appeared  to  important 
men,  military  and  political,  in  Europe  at  that 
time. 

Some  one  said  during  the  summer  of  1918  when 
asked  how  much  the  American  man  and  woman  in 
the  street  really  knew  of  what  was  going  on  in 
Europe,  that  if  the  headlines  of  American  news 
papers  were  disregarded  and  the  actual  tele 
graphic  reports  themselves  read  day  by  day, 
nearly  everything  that  anybody  from  commanding 
generals  down  knew  was  known  to  that  reader. 
There  were,  of  course,  many  discussions  amongst 
the  guiding  intellects,  political  and  military,  which 
never  saw  the  light.  There  were,  naturally,  plans 
discussed  and  never  carried  out  which  the  Ameri 
can  citizen  did  not  hear  of  at  any  time.  But  the 
general  consensus  of  opinion  seems  to  be  that  the 
238 


The  Great  War 


American  newspaper  reader  knew  almost  as  much 
as  any  one  of  what  was  happening  and  that  he 
certainly  knew  as  much  of  what  was  going  to 
happen  as  the  men  in  the  inner  circle. 

Much  that  has  come  out  since  the  armistice 
shows  a  condition  of  affairs  almost  as  the  man  in 
the  street  knew  it  at  the  time.  In  the  winter  of 
1917-18  we  knew  that  a  huge  drive  was  scheduled 
by  the  Germans  on  the  Franco-Belgian  front  in 
the  spring.  In  the  following  summer  we  knew 
the  doubtful  situation  around  Chateau-Thierry. 
In  the  middle  of  July  we  knew  that  something  was 
happening,  that  the  Americans  were  beginning  to 
go  in  in  large  numbers,  that  the  German  "push" 
was  slowing  up ;  and  that  a  turn  had  been  made. 
Finally  we  knew  that  the  German  army  was  sud 
denly  retiring,  and  for  a  month  before  the  armis 
tice  was  signed  we  knew  that  it  was  going  to  be 
signed.  Indeed  so  sure  was  the  American  public 
of  this  last  that  they  celebrated  the  end  of  the 
war  throughout  this  great  land  a  week  ahead  of 
time,  because  of  a  report  which,  though  literally 
incorrect,  was  in  essence  true  and  known  to  be 
true. 

239 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

It  is  not  uninteresting,  therefore,  to  review  the 
sentiments  and  opinions  which  Wood  found  upon 
his  arrival  amongst  the  French  and  English  states 
men  and  soldiers  between  January  1  and  February 
26th,  1918. 

In  London  Lloyd  George,  the  British  Premier, 
knew  Wood  as  the  administrator  of  Cuba  and 
the  Philippines.  He  knew  also  of  Wood's  expe 
rience  with,  and  knowledge  of  European  armies. 
He  was  anxious  for  Wood  to  be  in  Europe.  He 
laid  great  emphasis  upon  the  shortage  of  American 
air  service  which  made  it  difficult  for  American 
troops  to  work  as  a  separate  unit  without  English 
or  French  cooperation.  He  pled  for  American 
troops  at  the  earliest  possible  moment  and  offered 
more  transportation  facilities — even  though  Eng 
land  had  already  transported  not  only  her  own 
men  but  many  of  ours  across  the  Atlantic. 

General  Sir  William  Robertson  stated  in  Janu 
ary  that  there  was  an  impending  crisis  coming  in 
the  early  spring;  that  Germany  would  make  an 
immensely  powerful  drive  toward  Paris  or  the 
channel  ports  or  both;  and  that  in  his  opinion 
the  Allied  lines  would  hold  until  the  Americans 
240 


The  Great  War 


got  into  the  war  with  full  strength.  But  he  made 
no  concealment  of  the  fact  that  the  next  six 
months  would  be  very  critical  ones. 

Marshal  Joffre  held  similar  views.  Both  offi 
cers  expressed  the  opinion  that  the  summer  of 
1918  would  be  the  crisis  and  deciding  point  of 
the  war.  They,  too,  felt  the  French  and  English 
lines  would  hold,  but  they  laid  heavy  stress  upon 
the  importance  of  more  troops  from  America. 

On  the  French  front  Wood  lunched  and  had  a 
long  talk  with  him  at  the  front  and  another  at 
Paris  later  with  General  Petain  whom  he  knew  and 
who  knew  well  the  history  of  Wood's  career  in  or 
ganization  and  administration.  Petain  is  said  to 
have  expressed  the  hope  that  Wood  might  soon  be 
in  France  on  active  duty  and  to  have  said  that 
when  he  did  come  he  would  put  him  in  command 
of  an  army  of  French  and  American  troops. 

As  Grand  Officer  of  the  Legion  of  Honor,  next 
to  the  highest  rank  in  that  order — General  Wood 
was  naturally  received  by  all  French  officers  and 
statesmen.  This  order  having  been  conferred  upon 
him  some  years  before  because  of  his  record  in 
Cuba  and  the  Philippines  placed  him  in  a  small 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

group  of  men,  most  of  them,  naturally,  French, 
who  are  the  distinguished  men  of  Europe.  His  re 
ception  by  the  President  of  France,  by  the  pre 
mier,  Georges  Clemenceau,  and  other  French 
statesmen  came  as  a  matter  of  course.  But  the 
conversations  which  took  place  between  the  Amer 
ican  soldier  and  these  men  have  never,  naturally, 
been  made  public  except  in  some  of  their  bare  es 
sentials.  Nor  will  any  one  ever  know  just  what 
was  said  unless  one  or  another  of  the  parties  to 
them  shall  some  time  disclose  it  himself. 

There  seems  to  be  no  doubt,  however,  of  the 
very  warm  reception  which  this  senior  officer  of 
the  American  army  was  given.  His  record  in 
preparedness  work,  his  record  in  administrative 
and  organization  work  were  all  well  known  to  the 
statesmen  of  these  two  countries  who  were  from 
their  experience  with  colonial  matters  so  well 
fitted  to  judge  of  what  he  had  accomplished  along 
these  lines. 

General  Wood's  opinion  as  the  result  of  his  trip 
was  that  the  American  troops  should  serve  by 
divisions  for  a  time  with  the  French  and  English 
rather  than  as  a  separate  army  from  the  start, 


The  Great  War 


because  of  the  fact  that  all  matters  of  supply, 
equipment,  artillery,  air  service  and  so  on  which 
were  so  incomplete  in  the  American  service  and 
so  complete  by  this  time  in  the  British  and  French 
services  would  apply  to  the  Americans  as  well  as 
to  the  others  and  that  the  training  alongside  the 
veterans  of  over  three  years  of  war  would  make 
the  effectiveness  of  the  American  troops  quicker, 
better  and  more  definite — would  in  the  end  in 
crease  efficiency  and  save  life. 

After  having  reported  to  the  Senate  committee 
and  returned  to  Camp  Funston  he  took  up  with 
immeasurably  renewed  vigor  the  work  of  getting 
the  89th  Division,  which  he  was  to  take  abroad, 
ready  for  its  service,  and  all  was  prepared  when 
the  order  came  for  them  to  move  to  New  York  for 
embarkation.  This  work  of  transportation  being 
practically  completed  and  the  big  division  ready 
to  go  on  board  ship,  Leonard  Wood  felt  that  at 
last  his  chance  to  take  his  part  in  the  war  at  the 
front  had  come. 

It  is  practically  impossible  for  any  one,  there 
fore,  to  realize  just  what  it  meant  to  him,  or  would 
have  meant  to  any  man,  to  receive  notification  as 
243 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

he  was  almost  in  the  act  of  going  on  board  the 
transport  that  his  command  of  the  division  he 
had  trained  and  organized  was  taken  away  from 
him,  another  officer  put  in  his  place  and  he  himself 
ordered  to  the  farthest  possible  extremity  of  the 
United  States  in  the  opposite  direction.  It  is 
certainly  impossible  to  express  here  what  his  feel 
ings  were  since  nobody  really  knows  them. 

Imagination,  however,  which  plays  so  important 
a  part  in  this  world's  affairs  will  play  its  part 
here  as  elsewhere,  and  some  estimate  of  what 
effect  it  had  upon  the  country  was  shown  in  the 
outcry  which  arose  everywhere  and  which  created 
such  sudden  wrath  that  the  order  itself  was  imme 
diately  rescinded  and  changed  to  the  Funston  ap 
pointment. 

The  character  of  men  is  exhibited  in  infinite 
ways  and  by  infinite  methods,  but  never  more 
surely  than  during  critical  periods  when  passions 
run  high  and  injustice  seems  to  be  in  the  saddle. 
It  is  always  at  such  times  that  reserve  force, 
mental  strength,  and  all  the  sound  basic  qualities 
which  make  up  what  we  call  character  play  their 
important  parts  in  the  drama  of  life.  No  one  has, 
244 


The  Great  War 


so  far  as  our  history  tells  us,  shown  greater 
strength  of  this  nature  than  Abraham  Lincoln, 
and  it  is  that  reserve,  that  amazing  common  sense 
which  "with  malice  toward  none,  with  charity 
for  all"  led  him  on  all  occasions  no  matter  how 
extraordinary  the  provocation  to  decline  to  let 
personalities,  jealousies,  or  any  of  the  baser 
passions  control  his  actions  or  influence  his  deci 
sions. 

It  would  be  ridiculous  for  any  one  to  assume 
that  General  Wood  was  not  cut  to  the  quick  by 
this  unexplained  action,  which  took  the  cup  from 
his  lips  as  he  was  about  to  drink,  but  there  never 
has  appeared  anywhere  anything  emanating  from 
him  which  criticized,  questioned  or  in  any  way 
took  exception  to  it.  One  may  read,  however, 
between  the  lines  of  his  short  good-by  to  the 
division  which  he  created  many  thoughts  that  may 
have  been  in  his  mind  and  that  certainly  were  in 
the  minds  of  the  officers  of  the  89th  to  whom  this 
simple  address  was  the  first  intimation  that  he  was 
not  to  lead  them  into  action  in  France.  It  is  so 
direct,  so  simple,  so  manly  that,  like  all  such 
documents,  it  is  only  with  time  that  its  great 
245 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

hearted  spirit  makes  the  true  impression  on  any 
reader.  It  will  take  its  place  in  the  history  of 
this  country  amongst  the  few  documents  which 
live  on  always  because  they  exhibit  a  wise  anc! 
sane  outlook  upon  life  and  because  they  make  a 
universal  appeal  to  the  best  that  lives  always  like 
a  divine  spark  in  the  heart  of  every  man. 

It  makes  the  boy  in  school  exclaim,  "Some  day 
when  I  grow  up  I  will  do  that."  It  lives  in  the 
dreams  that  come  just  before  sleep  as  the  attitude 
the  young1  man  would  like  to  take  when  his  critical 
hour  comes.  It  cheers  the  old,  since  they  can 
say:  "So  long  as  this  can  be  done  there  is  no 
fear  for  our  native  land." 

Here  it  is : 

"I  will  not  say  good-by,  but  consider  it  a 
temporary  separation — at  least  I  hope  so.  I 
have  worked  hard  with  you  and  you  have  done 
excellent  work.  I  had  hoped  very  much  to  take 
you  over  to  the  other  side.  In  fact,  I  had  no 
intimation,  direct  or  indirect,  of  any  change  of 
orders  until  we  reached  here  the  other  night.  The 
orders  have  been  changed  and  I  am  to  go  back  to 
Funston.  I  leave  for  that  place  to-morrow  morn- 
246 


STAT2        OP       KANSAS 
GOVERNOR '3  OFFICE. 


KNOW  ALL  JEN  BY  TKESE  PRESENTS: 

ISASITJCH  as   the  life  of  a  state,    its  strength  and  virtue 
and  moral  worth  are  directly  dependent  upon  the   character  of  the  citl» 
zens  who   compose   it,    and 

INASMUCH  ns    it   is  a  solemn  obligation  imposed  upon  the  Gov 
ernor  of   the    state   to   promote  and  advance    the    interests  and  well-being 
of  the  coarionwealth   in  every  way  consistent  with  due  regard  for  the 
rights  and  privileges   of   sister  otatea,    and 

WKEHBAS,    the   soldier,   Leonard  Wood,    liajor  General  in  the 
United  States  Army  and  now  commandant  at  Camp  Funston,  has  shown  by 
his  daily  life,   by  his   devotion   to  duty,   by  hia  high   ideals  and  by  hit 
love   of   country,    that  he   is  a  high-ainded  man   after  our  own  hearts, 
four-square   to  all   the  world,   one  good   to  know, 

NOW,   THEREFORE.   I,  Arthur  Capper,   Governor  of  the  State  at 
Kansas,   do  hereby  declare   the  said 

1UJOR   GENERAL  LEONARD  WOOD 

to  be,    in  character  and   in  Ideals,    a  true  Kar.san.       And  by  virtue  of 
the  esteem  and  affection   the  people   of  Kansas  bear  him,    I  do  furthermore 
declare  him  to  be   to  all   intents  and  purposes  a  citisen  of  this  state, 
and  as   sue!. to   be  entitled   to  speak   the  Kansas   language,    to  follow  Kansas 
customs  and   to  be  known  as 


CITIZBN  EXTRAORDINARY. 


IN  WITNESS  WHEREOF  I  have  hereunto 
subscribed  ay  naae  and  caused  to  be 
affixed   the  Great  Seal  of   the  State 
of  Kansas.        Done   at  Topeka,    the 
capitol.    this  19th  day  of  December, 
D.   1917. 


G  0   V  S  R 


The  Great  War 


ing.  I  wish  you  the  best  of  luck  and  ask  you  to 
keep  up  the  high  standard  of  conduct  and  work 
you  have  maintained  in  the  past.  There  is  nothing 
to  be  said.  These  orders  stand;  and  the  only 
thing  to  do  is  to  do  the  best  we  can — all  of  us — to 
win  the  war.  That  is  what  we  are  here  for.  That 
is  what  you  have  been  trained  for.  I  shall  follow 
your  career  with  the  deepest  interest — with  just 
as  much  interest  as  if  I  were  with  you.  Good  luck ; 
and  God  bless  you!" 

A  few  days  later  Wood  had  returned  to  Funston 
and  begun  preparations  for  the  training  of  the 
10th  Division,  when  by  executive  action  the  Gov 
ernor  of  Kansas  acknowledged  on  his  own  behalf 
and  on  behalf  of  the  State  the  General's  services 
to  his  country  by  making  him  a  "citizen  extraor 
dinary"  of  the  State. 

The  story  of  the  Tenth  Division  is  short  but 
illuminating.  It  was  composed  principally  of 
drafted  men.  Its  first  groups  began  to  organize 
at  Funston  on  the  10th  of  August — raw  men  from 
office,  farm  and  shop.  They  found  there  the 
skeletons  of  so-called  regular  regiments — regi 
ments  which  were  regular  only  in  name ;  that  is  to 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

say,  there  were  only  a  very  few  regular  officers 
of  experience  and  a  limited  number  of  men 
recently  recruited  under  the  old  system.  On  the 
24th  General  Wood  reviewed  the  whole  division. 
On  November  1st  it  was  ready,  trained,  equipped 
and  in  condition  both  from  the  physical  and  the 
military  point  of  view  to  go  abroad.  And  when 
the  armistice  was  signed  on  November  llth  an 
advance  contingent  had  already  gone  to  France 
to  prepare  for  its  reception.  About  the  middle 
of  September  the  British  and  French  Senior  Mis 
sion — three  officers  of  each  army — reported  at 
Funston  and  remained  there  for  six  weeks.  And 
upon  their  departure  on  November  1st  after  a 
long,  rigid  and  critical  examination  of  the  division 
they  stated  that  in  their  opinion  it  was  by  far 
the  best  prepared  and  trained  division  that  they 
had  seen  in  this  country. 

Here  again  appears  the  same  quality  that  made 
McKinley  appoint  Wood  Governor-General  of 
Cuba;  that  made  Roosevelt  send  him  to  organize 
the  apparently  unorganizable  part  of  the  Philip 
pine  Islands;  that  caused  the  French  to  award 
him  the  highest  order  of  the  Legion  of  Honor; 
250 


The  Great  War 


that  made  the  State  of  Kansas  take  him  into  its 
family  as  a  citizen;  that  led  the  generals  of 
Europe  to  hope  he  would  come  and  be  one  of 
them;  and  finally  that  caused  many  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  his  own  countrymen  to  follow  him 
and  support  him  in  his  plans  to  prepare  the  people 
of  his  nation  for  what  eventually  came  upon  them. 

With  the  signing  of  the  armistice  and  the  vic 
torious  ending  of  the  war  Wood's  activities  did 
not  cease.  With  characteristic  energy  he  began 
the  work  of  looking  out  for  the  soldiers  who  would 
soon  be  demobilized  from  the  army  and  thrown 
upon  their  own  resources.  He  saw  how  changed 
the  outlook  of  many  of  these  men  would  be.  He 
saw  the  troubles  in  which  thousands — actually 
millions — of  them  would  be  involved,  not  through 
any  fault  of  their  own,  not  through  any  fault  of 
the  Government  or  of  army  life,  but  because  they 
had  undergone  certain  mental  changes  incident  to 
training,  to  active  service,  and  hence  could  not 
again  return  to  the  point  they  had  reached  when 
their  military  service  began. 

He,  therefore,  instituted  in  Chicago,  where  as 
Commander  of  the  Central  Department  he  had  his 
251 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

headquarters,  as  well  as  in  St.  Louis,  Kansas 
City  and  Cleveland,  organizations  to  look  to  the 
finding  of  employment  for  returning  officers  and 
men.  And  in  addresses  and  all  methods  open  to 
him  he  urged  the  organization  of  similar  bodies 
in  all  cities  to  accomplish  elsewhere  the  same  ob 
ject.  His  attitude  was  that  of  the  father  of 
children — the  rearrangement  on  new  lines  of  the 
American  family ;  and  he  again  found  universal 
support. 

"Appreciation  of  the  work  done  by  our  Soldiers, 
Sailors  and  Marines  in  the  Great  War  can  best 
be  shown  by  active  measures  to  return  them  to 
suitable  civil  employment  upon  their  discharge 
from  service.  The  four  million  men  inducted  into 
the  service,  less  the  dead,  are  being  returned  to 
their  homes.  In  seeing  that  they  are  returned  to 
suitable  civil  employment,  and  by  that  I  mean 
employment  in  which  they  will  find  contentment, 
we  will  find  it  at  times  difficult  to  deal  with  them. 
We  must  remember  that  many  of  these  men,  before 
going  in  for  the  great  adventure,  had  never  been 
far  from  home,  had  never  seen  the  big  things  of  life, 
had  never  had  the  opportunity  of  finding  them- 


The  Great  War 


selves.  During  their  service  in  the  army  they 
found  out  that  all  men  were  equal  except  as  dis 
tinguished  one  from  the  other  by  such  characteris 
tics  as  physique,  education  and  character.  They 
discovered  that  men  who  are  loyal,  attentive  to 
duty,  always  striving  to  do  more  than  required, 
stood  out  among  their  fellows  and  were  marked 
for  promotion.  Naturally  many  of  them  now  see 
that  their  former  employment  will  not  give  them 
the  opportunities  for  advancement  which  they 
have  come  to  prize,  and  for  that  reason  they  want 
a  change.  They  want  a  kind  of  employment  which 
offers  opportunities  for  promotion.  Many  such 
men  are  fitted  for  forms  of  employment  which  offer 
this  advantage,  and  they  must  be  given  the  oppor 
tunity  to  try  to  make  good  in  the  lines  of  endeavor 
which  they  elect  to  follow.  It  is  not  charity  to 
give  these  men  the  opportunities  for  which  they 
strive.  It  is  Justice.  Others  are  not  mentally 
equipped  to  take  advantage  of  such  opportunities 
if  offered,  and  with  these  we  will  find  it  more  diffi 
cult  to  deal.  They  must  be  reasoned  with  and 
directed,  if  possible,  into  the  kind  of  employment 
best  suited  to  their  characteristics.  Let  us  remem- 
253 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

ber  that  a  square  deal  for  our  honorably  dis 
charged  Soldiers,  Sailors  and  Marines  will 
strengthen  the  morale  of  the  Nation  and  will  help 
to  create  a  sound  national  consciousness  ready  to 
act  promptly  in  support  of  Truth,  Justice  and 
Right."* 

There  is,  with  the  differences  patent  because  of 
time  and  place  and  surrounding  circumstances,  a 
flavor  to  this  plea  that  recalls  another  address 
upon  a  similar  subject  more  than  fifty  years  ago: 

"It  is  for  the  living,  rather,  to  be  dedicated 
here  to  the  unfinished  work  which  they  who  fought 
here  have  thus  far  so  nobly  advanced.  It  is 
rather  for  us  to  be  here  dedicated  to  the  great 
task  remaining  before  us — that  from  these  hon 
ored  dead  we  take  increased  devotion  to  that  cause 
for  which  they  gave  the  last  full  measure  of  devo 
tion — that  we  here  highly  resolve  that  these  dead 
shall  not  have  died  in  vain — that  this  nation  under 
God  shall  have  a  new  birth  of  freedom — and  that 
government  of  the  people,  by  the  people,  for  the 
people  shall  not  perish  from  the  earth."  f 

f  Address  of  Leonard  Wood. 
*  Lincoln's  Gettysburg  Speech. 


THE  RESULT 


THE  RESULT 

IN  these  days,  therefore,  immediately  follow 
ing  the  Great  War  it  is  well  to  keep  in  our  own 
minds  and  try  to  put  into  the  minds  of  others  the 
great  elemental  truths  of  life;  and  to  try  at  the 
same  time  to  keep  out  of  our  and  their  minds  in 
so  far  as  possible  the  unessential  and  changing 
superficialities  which  never  last  long  and  which 
never  move  forward  the  civilization  of  the  human 
race. 

This  very  simple  biographical  sketch  is  not  an 
attempt  to  settle  the  problems  of  the  hour.  Such 
an  attempt  might  excite  the  amusement  and  inter 
est  of  students  of  that  mental  disease  known  as 
paranoia — students  who  are  far  too  busy  at  the 
moment  as  it  is  without  this  addition  to  the 
unusually  large  supply  of  patients — but  it  could 
not  add  anything  either  to  the  pleasure  or  enter 
tainment  of  any  one  else.  That  the  simple  bio 
graphical  sketch  can  even  approach  the  latter 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

accomplishment  may  be  held  to  be  a  matter  for 
reasonable  doubt. 

Nor,  furthermore,  is  the  sketch  an  attempt  at 
the  soap  box  or  other  variety  of  philosophy  which 
one  individual  attempts  to  thrust  down  the  mental 
throats  of  his  fellow  beings.  There  exists  a  hazy 
suspicion  that  the  fellow  beings  are  quite  com 
petent  to  decide  what  they  will  swallow  mentally 
and  what  they  will,  vulgarly  speaking,  expectorate 
forthwith. 

The  simple  biographical  sketch  is  a  frank 
attempt  to  express,  as  at  least  one  person  sees  it, 
the  character,  the  accomplishments  and  the  service 
rendered  by  one  man  to  his  country  throughout 
a  life  which  seems  to  have  been  singularly  sturdy, 
honest,  normal  and  consistent,  and  which,  there 
fore,  is  an  example  to  his  countrymen  that  may  in 
these  somewhat  hectic  times  well  be  considered 
and  perhaps  even  emulated. 

At  the  risk,  however,  of  entering  the  paranoiac's 
clinic  it  would  seem  almost  necessary  if  not  even 
desirable  to  apply  the  record  discussed  to  the 
situation  which  confronts  us  in  these  days,  since 
biography  has  no  special  significance  unless  it 
258 


The  Remit 


brings  to  others  some  more  or  less  effective 
stimulus  to  better  and  greater  endeavor  on  their 
own  part. 

If,  therefore,  the  life  and  record  of  a  man  like 
Leonard  Wood  is  to  be  of  value  to  others  it  must 
to  some  extent  at  least  be  considered  in  relation 
to  the  events  of  his  day  and  time.  These  events 
have  been  sufficiently  startling  in  the  light  of  all 
previous  history  to  make  it  perhaps  permissible 
to  glance  over  them. 

Roughly  speaking,  since  Wood  was  born  trans 
portation  has  become  so  perfected  that,  in  the 
light  of  our  navy's  recent  accomplishments  with 
the  seaplane,  it  is  now  possible  for  a  human  being 
to  go  from  New  York  to  London  in  the  same 
period  of  time  that  it  took  then  to  go  from  New 
York  to  New  London.  It  is  fair  to  assume  then 
that  the  distance  of  New  York  from  London  so 
far  as  human  travel  goes  is  or  will  shortly  be  the 
same  as  the  distance  of  New  York  from  New  Lon 
don  when  Wood  was  born. 

Roughly  speaking  since  Wood  was  born  inter 
course  between  persons  by  means  of  conversation 
has  become  so  perfected  that  it  is  now  possible  for 
259 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

two  people,  one  in  New  York  and  the  other  in 
San  Francisco,  to  converse  over  the  telephone — 
wireless  or  otherwise — as  easily  as  could  two  per 
sons  when  Wood  was  born  talk  from  one  room  to 
another  through  an  open  doorway.  So  that  for 
practical  purposes  the  three  or  four  thousand 
mile  breadth  of  this  continent  is  reduced  to  what 
then  was  a  matter  of  ten  feet. 

One  might  continue  indefinitely,  but  these  two 
examples  are  sufficient.  If  San  Francisco  is  no 
further  away  than  the  next  room  and  if  London 
can  be  reached  as  quickly  as  New  London,  and  if 
myriads  of  other  physical  changes  of  this  sort 
have  occurred  in  sixty  years,  then  it  is  fair  to 
assume  that  there  has  been  an  equal  amount  of 
resulting  psychological  change.  These  changes 
in  the  relation  of  man  to  his  surroundings  and 
the  consequent  changes  in  his  relations  to  himself 
and  his  fellow  beings  have  probably  done  more 
to  rearrange  the  world  on  a  different  basis  than 
all  the  developments  of  the  half-dozen  centuries 
that  preceded  the  nineteenth. 

The  elimination  of  distance,  the  making  of 
human  relation  as  easy  for  continents  as  for 
260 


The  Remit 


adjoining  communities  lessens  the  size  of  the  world 
and  standardizes  the  rules  that  govern  life.  All  in 
tellectual,  political,  commercial  and  military  pro 
cedures  have  changed  therefore  in  the  last  half 
century  to  a  greater  extent  than  in  hundreds  of 
years  prior  thereto.  One  race  in  the  fifth  or  sixth 
grade  of  civilization  begins  to  discover  what  the 
other  race  in  the  first  grade  is  doing.  One  com 
mercial  country  of  a  lower  order  finds  what  it  is 
losing  because  of  another  country  of  a  higher 
order  of  commercialism.  The  laborers  of  Barce 
lona  discover  what  the  laborers  of  New  York  are 
receiving  in  compensation  for  the  same  work.  The 
people  of  Russia  discover  the  different  political 
conditions  existing  amongst  themselves  and  the 
people  of  England  and  France.  The  government 
of  the  German  Empire  sees  what  a  united  nation 
backed  by  the  biggest  army  on  earth  might  do  in 
Europe.  The  men  of  Austria  who  have  no  vote 
learn  what  the  men  of  the  United  States  procure 
from  universal  suffrage. 

With  the  belief  on  every  human  being's  part 
that  the  other  fellow  is  better  off  than  he,  with 
the  education  which  goes  on  through  the  medium 
261 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

of  emigration  and  immigration,  with  the  immense 
number  of  detail  short  cuts,  with  the  prodigious 
increase  in  reading  and  the  resulting  acquirement 
of  the  ideas  of  others,  with  the  myriad  of  other 
matters  patent  to  any  one  who  thinks — with  all 
this  and  because  of  it  the  methods  and  procedure 
of  daily  life  have  changed  entirely  throughout 
most  of  the  civilized  world  since  a  man  who  is 
now  nearly  sixty  was  born. 

At  the  same  time  the  family  remains  the  same; 
the  marriage  law  is  unchanged;  the  right  of  pri 
vate  property  is  what  it  was  in  the  days  of  an 
cient  Rome.  The  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  is  what  it  was  a  hundred  and  thirty  years 
ago.  Justice  is  the  same  as  it  was  in  the  time  of 
Alexander.  The  Golden  Rule  has  not  been  altered 
since  the  time  of  Christ.  Love,  hate,  fear  and 
courage  stand  as  they  were  originally  some  time 
prior  to  the  stone  age. 

To  revert,  then,  to  the  simile  of  the  construc 
tion  of  the  house,  it  seems  true  that  while  the 
plaster  and  the  wall  paper — the  decorations  of  its 
interior  and  exterior — change  from  time  to  time, 
nevertheless  on  the  whole,  as  a  rule,  in  the  main, 


The  Result 


the  passage  of  the  great  ages  has  not  materially 
changed  the  supports  of  the  structure — and  never 
will. 

In  the  matter  of  interior  and  exterior  decora 
tion  periods  come  and  go  during  which  those  who 
build  houses  decorate  according  to  schools  of  art. 
It  is  the  only  belief  that  any  sane  and  hopeful 
human  being  can  have  that  these  schools  of  decora 
tion  for  the  old  house  of  civilization  in  the  main 
steadily  improve.  If  it  is  not  so,  then  we  have 
nothing  to  live  for,  nothing  to  which  we  may  look 
forward-  Also,  however,  there  are  fashions  and 
fads  running  along  by  the  side  of  these  great 
schools  which  are  suggestive,  amusing  or  ludi 
crous,  as  the  case  may  be.  The  cubists  and  the 
followers  of  the  old  masters  paint  at  the  same 
time.  One,  however,  dies  shortly  and  the  other 
lives  on — often  to  be  sure  affected  in  some  slight 
waj  by  the  grotesque  but  honest  fad,  but  never 
giving  way  to  it. 

In  the  month  of  November,  1918,  greater 
changes  of  this  nature  took  place  in  the  political 
world  than  in  all  the  years  which  preceded  that 
month  since  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  era. 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

In  that  month  some  scores  of  crowned  heads 
stepped  down  from  their  thrones  and  made  haste 
to  reach  shelter  as  do  the  rats  in  a  kitchen 
when  the  cook  turns  on  the  electric  light.  At 
that  time  something  like  three  hundred  millions 
of  people  gave  up  their  particular  forms  of  gov 
ernment  and  to  a  certain  extent  have  been  living 
on  since  without  any  substitute. 

Some  of  these  crowned  heads  have  sat  on  their 
thrones  from  five  to  ten  centuries.  Some  of  the 
governments  have  lived  as  long. 

It  looks  like  a  general  tumble  of  the  house  of 
civilization.  And  yet  most  of  these  millions  of 
people  go  on  getting  up  in  the  morning,  going  to 
bed  at  night  and,  impossible  as  it  may  seem,  con 
ducting  commercial  enterprises.  The  kings  have 
gone ;  the  governments  have  gone ;  yet  the  people 
remain  and  their  daily  life  goes  on — not  as  usual 
— but  in  the  main  the  same. 

At  such  a  time  amidst  such  stupendous  changes 
it  is  natural  that  an  infinite  number  of  plans  for 
reconstruction  come  forward.  All  the  century- 
old  panaceas  crop  up.  All  the  moss-grown  plans 
for  a  perfect  world  are  thrust  forward  in  a  new 
264 


The  Remit 


dress  and  naturally  gain  credence.  And  with  the 
increased  ease  of  intercommunication  of  individuals 
and  ideas  the  opportunity  not  only  for  many  more 
but  for  widely  divergent  theories  to  make  them 
selves  heard  is  immeasurably  increased.  Thus  it 
becomes  possible  for  a  Lenine  and  a  Trotzky  to 
leave  their  tenement  flats  in  the  slums  of  New  York 
and  proceed  to  the  palaces  of  the  Czar  to  show 
the  hundred  and  twenty  millions  of  Russians  what 
can  be  done — and,  what  is  far  more  to  the  point, 
get  a  hearing.  Thus  it  becomes  possible  for  the 
International  Workers  of  the  World  in  Russia, 
France,  England  and  America  to  get  together  in 
conference  in  Switzerland  or  elsewhere  and  discuss 
how  best  to  destroy  not  only  governments,  but 
private  property,  law,  order,  the  family  and  all 
the  beams  of  the  great  house  at  one  time.  Thus 
it  becomes  possible  for  a  host  of  less  radical  but 
none  the  less  pernicious  plans  for  the  good  or  evil 
of  the  world  to  fly  about  amongst  unstable  but 
well-meaning  minds. 

Our  country,  so  remote  in  miles  from  the  scenes 
of  these  upheavals,  is  by  the  development  of  mod- 
265 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

ern  times  so  near  that  it  is  to  a  certain  extent 
affected  by  them. 

In  a  population  of  one  hundred  millions  in  the 
United  States  there  are  probably  one  hundred 
million  different  views  entertained  upon  each  of 
the  questions  of  this  disturbed  period.  But  a  fair 
classification  of  them  could  be  safely  made  into 
radicals,  moderates  and  conservatives — Boftshe- 
viki  and  theorists,  slow-moving  and  hard-thinking 
citizens  and  stiff-necked  reactionaries — all  honest 
and  earnest  in  the  main.  If  the  Bolsheviki  and 
theorists  outnumber  the  others  we  shall  have  a 
situation  in  the  United  States  similar  to  that  in 
Russia,  Austria  and  Germany.  If  the  stiff-necked 
reactionaries  outnumber  the  others,  we  shall 
smother  the  flame  for  a  time  only  to  have  it  burst 
forth  shortly  in  an  infinitely  more  terrible  explo 
sion.  If  the  slow-moving,  hard-thinking  citizens 
outnumber  the  others,  we  shall  maintain  the  main 
structure  of  our  house  so  laboriously  built 
throughout  the  ages  while  we  change  to  some 
extent  the  nature  of  the  wall  paper  and  the  plaster 
to  adapt  it  to  modern  conditions. 

Some  of  us  want  to  achieve  the  first,  some  the 
266 


The  Remit 


second  and  some  the  third  status ;  and  it  would 
be  safe  to  say  that  up  to  the  present  in  this  coun 
try  the  people  of  the  great  middle  class — the  not 
rich,  the  not  poor,  the  steady  business  man,  the 
ordinary  mother  of  a  family — are  in  the  majority 
and  are  trying  to  adapt  themselves  to  the  new 
conditions  even  if  only  in  a  slow  and  somewhat 
halting  manner. 

It  will  help  them  and  therefore  help  the  country 
to  maintain  themselves  and  itself  on  an  even  keel 
until  the  storm  subsides  if  they  can  have  some 
concrete  standard  to  work  by.  And  as  standards 
in  this  sense  usually  become  established  by  exam 
ple,  by  what  each  of  us  thinks  the  man  he  looks 
up  to  is  doing,  thinking  and  planning,  it  seems 
fair  to  say  that  the  example  of  a  few  leading  men 
of  the  strong  sanity  which  characterizes  General 
Wood  is  having  now  or  will  have  in  the  future  a 
great  influence  for  good. 

When  we  are  all  complaining  at  the  changing 
conditions,  when  we  see  apparently  permanent 
organizations  like  the  government  of  thousand- 
year-old  empires  crumbling  in  a  month,  when  we 
hear  the  new-old  theories  for  a  new  form  of  exis- 
267 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

tence,  we  are  somewhat  dazed,  somewhat  influenced 
by  the  outward  signs,  and  somewhat  skeptical 
about  our  own  small  but  to  ourselves  important 
outlook.  At  such  a  moment  the  voice  of  one  who 
says  in  substance :  "Do  not  let  superficial  changes 
— no  matter  how  important  they  seem — make  us 
forget  the  law  of  man  and  nature ;  do  not  forget 
that  the  fittest  survives ;  do  not  imagine  that  wars 
are  over  because  the  most  terrible  one  in  history 
is  just  finished;  do  not  hesitate  to  prepare  for 
your  own  duties  and  those  of  your  country ;  do 
not  forget  that  organization  and  cooperation  pro 
duce  peace,  safety,  prosperity  and  happiness" — 
when  a  voice  in  our  land  announces  this  and  its 
owner  proves  by  his  whole  life  the  truth  of  his 
statements,  then  it  pays  to  listen  and  inwardly 
digest. 

In  spite  of  all  we  are  being  told  to  the  contrary, 
there  need  be  no  alarm  for  the  future  if  the 
country  contains  enough  of  such  leaders  to  make 
themselves  heard  above  the  babel  of  new  cries  and 
beliefs,  notwithstanding  the  attractive  pictures 
some  of  these  theorists  present.  For  that  reason 
leaders  must  always  exist  where  progress  is  to  be 
268 


The  Result 


made  and  the  great  majority  must  stand  behind 
them  to  back  them  up. 

The  effective  spear  cannot  do  its  work  without 
its  steel  point,  nor  yet  without  its  long  handle  to 
force  the  point  home. 

This  biographical  sketch  treats  of  one  of  these 
spear  points  and  as  such  represents  to  a  greater 
or  less  degree  all  great  sane  leaders,  though  it 
speaks  of  but  one. 

Leonard  Wood's  personality  is  one  of  mental 
sanity  and  physical  health.  It  is  non-reactionary 
and  non-visionary.  It  is  military  only  in  the  sense 
that  the  army  happens  to  have  been  his  business 
in  life.  His  business  might  have  been  that  of  the 
law,  of  banking,  or  leather,  without  in  the  least 
changing  in  it.  He  once  said  of  this : 

"The  officers  of  the  Army  and  Navy  are  the 
professional  servants  of  the  government  in  mat 
ters  pertaining  to  the  military  establishment. 
They  are  like  engineers,  doctors,  lawyers,  or  any 
other  class  of  professional  men  whose  services  peo 
ple  employ  because  they  are  expert  in  their  line  of 
work.  They  do  not  initiate  wars.  Nine-tenths  of 
all  wars  have  their  origin  directly  or  indirectly  in 
269 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

issues  arising  out  of  trade.  The  people  make 
war;  the  government  declares  it;  and  the  officers 
of  the  army  and  navy  are  charged  with  the  respon 
sibility  of  terminating  it  with  such  means  and 
implements  as  the  people  may  give  them." 

His  voice  raised  in  behalf  of  preparedness  refers 
therefore  to  the  military,  because  as  a  Major- 
General  in  the  United  States  Army  he  is  not  em 
powered  to  speak  of  other  walks  in  life.  Yet  his 
own  wide  experience  in  Cuba  and  the  Philippines 
in  administration,  very  little  of  which  was  mili 
tary,  is  a  witness  of  his  belief  in  preparedness  in 
all  life. 

He  founded  schools  where  there  were  none  to 
prepare  citizens  for  the  new  Cuban  republic.  He 
reorganized  and  built  up  customs  laws  and  regu 
lations  where  there  were  only  attempts  at  such  in 
order  to  prepare  revenue  to  build  roads  and  finish 
public  works  to  make  a  busy  and  healthy  nation. 
He  reestablished  sane  marriage  laws  in  order  to 
prepare  a  solid  community  resting  upon  the  basis 
of  the  clearly  defined  family.  In  the  Philippines 
he  instituted  local  government  to  prepare  the 
islands  for  self-government. 
270 


The  Remit 


None  of  these  acts,  nor  many  others  of  like 
nature,  had  anything  to  do  with  the  military. 
They  were  all  based  on  the  law  that  a  sound  and 
successful  community,  whether  that  community  be 
a  village,  town  or  nation,  rests  in  the  final  analysis 
on  personal,  individual  responsibility  which  in  the 
group  makes  a  responsible  government,  that  per 
sonal  responsibility  comes  only  from  preparation, 
from  execution  as  a  result  of  preparation  and  from 
efficiency  which  is  its  synonym. 

We  study  for  this  or  that  profession.  We 
cannot  practice  law  unless  we  prepare  and  take  a 
degree.  We  cannot  enter  the  medical  profession 
unless  we  study  and  take  a  degree.  Wood's  great 
thesis  is  that  we  cannot  become  sound  citizens  and, 
therefore,  in  the  group  a  sound  nation,  unless  we 
study  and  prepare  to  be  such. 

It  sounds  so  simple  that  one  wonders  why  it  is 
written.  And  yet  for  the  last  two  years  under  the 
guise  of  war  necessity  this  country  has  been  mov 
ing  in  quite  another  direction.  Instead  of  personal 
responsibility  we  have  been  substituting  more  and 
more  government  responsibility.  Instead  of  indi 
vidual  effort  we  have  been  advancing  governmental 
271 


The  Career  of  Leonard  Wood 

effort.  Instead  of  natural  competition  we  have 
been  substituting  government  regulation.  Instead 
of  advancing  patriotism,  nationalism,  American 
ism,  we  have  been  letting  all  these  give  way  to 
internationalism.  We  have  not  been  preparing 
ourselves  as  individuals  to  assume  individual  re- 
sponsiblity,  but  in  fact  we  have  been  giving  up  that 
responsibility  to  government. 

It  is  through  the  sense  of  the  people  quickened 
by  such  men  as  Wood  that  we  shall  come  back  to 
sounder  methods — not  to  where  we  were  before. 
That  can  never  be.  If  it  were  so,  the  world  would 
not  be  moving  forward.  But  we  shall  come  back 
to  the  basic  principle  that  individual  initiative, 
energy  and  the  rewards  that  accrue  therefrom  are 
and  always  must  be  the  basis  for  collective  initia 
tive,  energy  and  the  rewards  thereof ;  that  no  col 
lective  organization  such  as  a  government  can  re 
main  virile  and  effective  unless  its  component 
parts — the  individuals — remain  virile  and  effec 
tive. 

The  appeal  which  Wood's  life  makes  to  us  is 
toward  this  responsibility  of  the  individual  for 
his  own  work,  his  own  affairs,  his  own  family,  and 
272 


The  Result 


to  his  own  country,  and  that  has  been  found 
throughout  history  to  be  the  groundwork,  the 
foundation  upon  which  civilization  rests.  Trans 
lated  into  current  phrase  this  means  that  we  must 
follow  such  men  as  he,  keep  eternally  at  work  to 
improve  ourselves  individually,  to  make  a  good 
and  honest  living,  to  hand  on  the  torch  of  patriot 
ism,  of  sanity  and  of  ever-increasing  knowledge 
by  furnishing  to  the  world  the  new  generations 
that  shall  carry  it  on,  and  to  weld  and  stabilize 
the  whole  structure  by  building  up  Americanism 
within  our  borders.  In  the  vocabulary  of  General 
Wood  this  is  translated  again  into  the  words : 
"Prepare  !  Prepare  !  Prepare !" 

Such  has  been  the  career  of  the  New  Englander 
from  Cape  Cod  who  has  worked  in  his  own  land,  in 
the  tropics,  in  many  spheres,  at  many  problems 
until  at  the  age  of  fifty-eight  in  sound  mind  and 
body  he  stands  firmly  still  in  the  prime  of  life  ready 
for  many  years  yet  to  come  of  service  and  work 
for  himself,  his  family  and  his  fellow  countrymen. 

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